Our Director

Marianne Engelman-Lado

Marianne Engelman-Lado’s career has been devoted to civil rights and environmental justice. She recently joined New York University School of Law to serve as director of the Environmental Justice Initiative. During the Biden Administration she served as deputy general counsel for environmental initiatives in the Office of General Counsel and as acting principal deputy assistant administrator in the newly launched Office of Environmental Justice and External Civil Rights at the Environmental Protection Agency, where she focused on equity, environmental justice, and civil rights enforcement. 

She previously directed Environmental Justice Clinics at Yale and Vermont Law Schools, which trained students in community lawyering and civil rights enforcement in the environmental justice context, and served as lecturer at both the Yale University School of Public Health and the Yale School of the Environment, where she supervised interdisciplinary teams of law, environmental and public health students working on climate justice issues. She has served as senior staff attorney at Earthjustice, general counsel at New York Lawyers for the Public Interest (NYLPI), and staff attorney at the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, Inc. (LDF). 

Before joining EPA, she served as co-chair of the Equity and Environmental Justice Working Group of Connecticut’s Governor’s Council on Climate Change, and as a board member of WE ACT for Environmental Justice and the Center for Public Representation. Marianne has lectured widely and taught graduate, law and undergraduate level courses. She holds a BA in government from Cornell University, a JD from the University of California at Berkeley, and an MA in Politics from Princeton University. Recent publications include ”Pipeline Struggles: Case Studies in Ground Up Lawyering,” with Kenneth Rumelt, and “No More Excuses: Building a New Vision of Civil Rights Enforcement in the Context of Environmental Justice.”