CLSC | Socio-Legal Studies Workshop: Gregg Macey - "A Hauntology of Civil Rights and Environment"

Abstract
The systematic dismantling of environmental justice policy continues, from the rescinding of executive orders and disparate impact rules to the targeting of non-profit organizations and infrastructure funding. Yet from the dawn of the modern environmental justice movement in the 1970s to the end of the Biden Administration, nearly all claims of civil rights violations by frontline communities were met with silence. These claims lay dormant in rescued archives and stories, representing historical traumas that linger in the air, are never settled, and influence movement building to this day. Building on the work of Derrida, Fisher, Jameson, and others and analyzing the entire record of Title VI complaints filed by communities with the Environmental Protection Agency from 1971 to 2024, I provide a hauntology of these claims. The claims, and dynamics through which they haunt the present, influence and potentially limit the ability of social movements and lawmakers to invoke ideas of the future and build upon existing notions such as "fair treatment" and "meaningful involvement" in decisions that impact quality of life. Identifying and grappling with this "crisis of time" is the promise and potential of hauntological work in legal scholarship.