Earthjustice is pleased to announce Marianne Engelman Lado as the new co-managing attorney of Earthjustice’s Northeast office, located in New York City.

Marianne Engelman Lado joined Earthjustice in 2010 with more than 20 years of experience working on issues of health within the civil rights context. She chairs Earthjustice’s Health Practice Group, leading the organization’s work to address the health problems facing overly burdened communities and the ways in which contamination of our environment affects all of our lives.

Lado has successfully led a lawsuit representing an array of communities in the Gulf who were concerned about the health and environmental effects of the unprecedented use of chemical dispersants in response to the BP oil spill. Her Freedom of Information Act lawsuit ensured that Gulf communities had online access to information about the toxic chemicals in dispersants. Lado has also successfully intervened in cases that forced government reporting and information disclosure on carcinogenic chemicals such as styrene, and her work has brought legal resources to low-income communities and communities of color that have been dealing with contamination from industrial agriculture.

Before joining Earthjustice, Lado served for 10 years as the director of litigation and advocacy at New York Lawyers for the Public Interest (NYLPI), a non-profit civil rights law firm that focuses on racial and ethnic disparities in access to health care, environmental justice, and disability rights. She was previously a staff attorney at the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund (LDF), and she played a key role in the development of the National Campaign to Restore Civil Rights, a nationwide effort to address the rollback of civil rights by the courts.

Lado, currently Lecturer-at-Law at Columbia Law School, where she teaches law students about environmental justice, has also lectured widely and has taught graduate and undergraduate level courses in public administration, health policy, family law, and education law at the School of Law at Seton Hall University and at Baruch College. She holds a Bachelor of Arts in government from Cornell University, a J.D. from the University of California at Berkeley, a Masters of Arts in politics from Princeton University, and bar admission in New York.

Lado will work alongside current Northeast Office managing attorney Deborah Goldberg, who leads the organization’s fracking litigation. This move also allows Goldberg, who has achieved national recognition for her fracking work and impressive litigation success in New York and Pennsylvania, to expand her work in fracking litigation and as co-chair of Earthjustice’s national practice group on oil and gas.