Janette L. Wipper Personal Biography

Janette Wipper is the second recipient of the George N. Lindsay Fellowship awarded by the Lawyers' Committee for Civil Rights Under Law. Through the George N. Lindsay Fellowship, Janette has launched a fellowship project that combines community education with litigation, in an effort to comprehensively serve low-income communities of color in pursuit of environmental justice.

The fellowship project is sponsoring environmental justice community training conferences that work to empower communities to effectively participate in environmental decision-making affecting their neighborhoods; that educate and train environmental justice advocates; that provide technical and legal services to affected communities; and that mobilize diverse resources -- including civil rights, environmental, public health, scientific, and public policy -- toward communities of color working for environmental justice.

The fellowship project's community education campaign is supplemented by an impact litigation initiative. As part of the litigation initiative, Janette is assisting the Lawyers' Committee's Environmental Justice Project in litigating environmental justice cases that bridge constitutional and civil rights laws with federal environmental laws as a means of establishing legal precedent in environmental justice, while adding resources to one of the few ongoing efforts committed to representing communities of color facing environmental discrimination in court. The fellowship project is aimed at providing direct legal and technical support to communities of color struggling against the proposed siting of environmental dangers, the ongoing resistance to cleaning-up existing environmental hazards, and the threat of future environmental risks. Through this litigation initiative, Janette is serving the immediate needs of under-represented communities while fostering the broader objective of effectuating wide-spread change, as she is working to develop innovative and unprecedented legal theories strategically designed to create a body of law that communities of color can depend upon in the future to secure their right to equal environmental protection, well after the fellowship is completed.

Janette has worked for the public interest for the past seven years on issues involving environmental justice, environmental protection and civil rights with organizations such as the Texas Civil Rights Project, AcciÖn EcolÖgica, Sierra Blanca Legal Defense Fund, Equal Justice Foundation, National Lawyers' Guild, Golden Eagle Program, Save Our Springs Coalition, and Conference on Non-Violence.

Janette is a graduate of Vermont Law School, J.D., cum laude, and the University of Texas at Austin, B.A.