Digital Commons Network^™

Using Federal Property Rights Laws For Environmental Justice, Colin Crawford

Publications

The late Ralph Santiago Abascal, who worked for years out of California Rural Legal Services and became one of the most admired legal service attorneys of his generation, was co-counsel in a celebrated environmental justice victory, El Pueblo Para Aqua y Aire Limpio v. County of Kings. El Pueblo successfully blocked the proposed siting of a hazardous waste incinerator by holding that the project's proponents had not translated the public review documents into Spanish in a majority monolingual Spanish-speaking community. Despite this victory, however, Abascal later observed, "The handful of reported environmental justice cases that have raised civil rights claims …