Legal Services
Exposing unjust law.
Initiating democracy.
CELDF dares to challenge law that strips communities of democracy, permits privateering corporations to violate human rights and the rights of nature, while lawmakers invoke empty platitudes about America’s commitment to equality, liberty, and justice.
Want to protect your community’s rights against corporate abuse? The courts say first exhaust all regulatory “remedies.” You know, the ones written by corporate lobbyists.
CELDF has worked with hundreds of communities across the U.S. to develop laws that call out and challenge industry bullying, toxic trespass, and government-permitted violations of the rights of communities and their natural environments. In addition, CELDF provides legal support to non-governmental organizations and governments around the world to advance the Rights of Nature.
We know why the strategy of regulating the rate of environmental destruction has failed to protect the environment. It was never meant to halt the profitable extraction of resources, the use of toxic technology and energy sources, and the endless production of more from the very substance of the living world. In every confrontation between Americans trying to protect themselves and their local environments against wealthy corporations, the courts double-down on Nature’s legal status as mere property, the community’s lack of legal authority and standing, and the corporation’s status as a rights-bearing person. Everything about this must change. CELDF is on the case to support communities that want to resist this unjust system.
“Civil government, so far as it is instituted for the security of property, is in reality instituted for the defence of the rich against the poor, or of those who have some property against those who have none at all.”
– Adam Smith, author of Wealth of Nations
CELDF FRONTALLY CHALLENGES SYSTEMIC INJUSTICE
CELDF champions the kind of democracy where the people directly affected participate in shaping the rules, because otherwise, Law is nothing but bullying.
Communities across America are under siege. In thousands of towns, air, water and soil are poisoned daily because agencies charged with protection instead grant corporations permits to dump forever chemicals and carcinogens, disguised as “beneficial use.” Regulatory agencies greenlight harm to shield corporate profits. This legalized invasion spans generations and all fifty states: every industrial greenhouse gas fueling climate change was released with government approval; every fracking well that poisoned drinking water had a permit; every bomb train, every toxic algae bloom from factory farms — all legal. LEGAL!
The same goes for corporate violations of human rights. Efforts to protect the homeless, immigrants, workers, or demand police accountability have been crushed by chambers of commerce, real estate lobbies, and corporate cash. The price of freedom and constitutional rights has risen beyond the people’s reach, while courts side with corporate usurpers of democracy.
CELDF’s legal stance is with the people and nature in community together. Always was; always will be.
What does CELDF’s LEGAL program offer?
CELDF’s legal assistance goes beyond the typical and desperate search for overlooked loopholes in corporate-biased anti-social laws. CELDF’s team understands the nuances and legal conundrums that trip up local organizers. Our guiding principle is to ask clients what it is they aspire to achieve, not “What’s the best deal you think you can get?” And then we get to it.
Corporate ideologues have turned state preemption into a community wrecking ball across the United States. Appropriately, CELDF’s legal focus has turned to state-level efforts to lift the weight of Dillon’s Rule off the chest of municipalities so they can breathe freely again. That’s why CELDF offers state constitutional amendments that recognize municipal and county authority to enact local rights-protecting laws that are free from state and corporate interference. We’ve also responded to requests for state legislation to do the same,
We also assist local communities selectively, where community solidarity and commitment to changing the legal power dynamics are deemed to be high. It isn’t enough for residents to know what needs to change, nor even to believe that change is possible. It will require organized collective actions by the community to implement the change.
Two years after we innovated for the rights for ecosystems in the United States in 2006, in Tamaqua Borough, Pennsylvania, CELDF’s international Rights of Nature work began in Ecuador. Ecuador consulted CELDF about the inclusion of Rights of Pachamama (rights of nature) as they drew up a new national constitution in 2008 and since then our advisory role in nations around the world has expanded.
As the Rights of Nature Movement assumes a planetary presence, CELDF has determined that making landmark judicial and legislative decisions coming out of South America available to English speakers is important to the movement setting deeper roots in the U.S. We have, therefore, commissioned translations and made them publicly available so that lawyers, judges, electeds and community members can read for themselves how Rights for Nature is being implemented.
Finally, a funny thing happened to the legal profession on its way to becoming a support system for the corporate-state. Attorneys of conscience started questioning their career choices. Many entered the profession intent on making a positive difference for people and communities seeking simple justice. A growing number of them have become fed-up with the legally programmed inferior status of Americans and the natural world in legal competition with a liability-free investor class that uses its corporate avatars to lord it over everyone. CELDF proposes bringing those attorneys together, with all their talents and scruples, to share stories and experiences and to map a new way forward in the context of law.
John Adams was wrong when he said that the U.S. Constitution created “a government of laws, and not of men.” Today there are plenty of laws, but only a minority of men who use them to their advantage.
