Marianne Engelman Lado is of counsel at Columbia Law School’s Environmental Clinic and the Poverty & Race Research Action Council (PRRAC), and she serves as a lecturer at the Yale University School of Forestry & Environmental Studies. As a Visiting Clinical Professor of Law at Yale Law School from 2017 through 2018, she directed an environmental justice clinic focusing on civil rights enforcement in the environmental justice context. She previously served as senior staff attorney at Earthjustice, where she focused on civil rights enforcement, as well as related issues in the areas of toxics, waste, the health impacts of industrial agriculture, and the effects of environmental contamination on vulnerable and overburdened populations. She previously served for ten years as general counsel at New York Lawyers for the Public Interest (NYLPI), a non-profit civil rights law firm, where she directed a legal and advocacy program focused on racial and ethnic disparities in access to health care, environmental justice, and disability rights.
She began her legal career as a staff attorney at the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, Inc. (LDF), where she represented clients attempting to break barriers of access to health care and quality education. Marianne lectures widely and has taught graduate, law and undergraduate level courses at Columbia University, the School of Law at Seton Hall University, and Baruch College. She holds a B.A. in government from Cornell University, a J.D. from the University of California at Berkeley, and an M.A. in Politics from Princeton University. Her publications include “Unfinished Agenda: The Need for Civil Rights Litigation to Address Continuing Patterns of Race Discrimination and Inequalities in Access to Health Care,” “Breaking the Barriers of Access to Health Care: A Discussion of the Role of Civil Rights Litigation and the Relationship Between Burdens of Proof and the Experience of Denial,” “Evaluating Systems for Delivering Legal Services to the Poor: Conceptual and Methodological Considerations” (co-authored with Gregg G. Van Ryzin), and “A Question of Justice: African-American Legal Perspectives on the 1883 Civil Rights Cases.”