As the managing attorney for Earthjustice’s Chicago office, Debbie Chizewer has been building a Midwest team and a docket of cases across three program areas — climate and energy, healthy communities, and wild lands and wildlife. This team’s work includes representation of Tribal Nations in the fight against the risky Line 5 oil pipeline and advocacy on behalf of Black, low-income communities facing disproportionate environmental harms from air and water pollution.

This work builds on Debbie’s experience over the last two decades where she advocated for environmental protection across many issues — fighting for environmental justice in the Midwest at Northwestern Law’s environmental law clinic, promoting Great Lakes health at the Alliance for the Great Lakes, and protecting wildlife and public lands in the Rockies for the National Wildlife Federation.

While at Northwestern’s Environmental Advocacy Clinic, Debbie led the clinic’s representation and a legal coalition that represented a community group living on a Superfund site, contaminated with lead and arsenic, in East Chicago, Indiana. The work not only led to improved outcomes for the impacted community members but also led to the publication of the Poisonous Homes report which advocated for policy changes to protect residents living in public housing near contaminated sites.

Debbie also completed ten years of service, including five years as the Board Chair, for the Shriver Center on Poverty Law, a national nonprofit dedicated to promoting economic and racial justice.

Debbie graduated from Princeton University and Boston University School of Law. After graduation from law school, she clerked in the U.S. District Court in the District of Delaware.