Projects
Assisting Chicago’s Englewood Community as it Faces the Largest Rail Merger in U.S. History
The Environmental Advocacy Center (EAC) represents Sustainable Englewood Initiatives (SEI), a grassroots advocacy organization based in the Englewood neighborhood on the South Side of Chicago. The EAC assists SEI in addressing environmental impacts from decades of disinvestment and freight industry expansion in the longstanding collaboration. Most recently, the EAC represents SEI regarding the proposed merger between Union Pacific and Norfolk Southern, currently under review by the federal Surface Transportation Board.
The merger between Union Pacific and Norfolk Southern, announced in the summer of 2025, would be the largest in U.S. history and launch the first transcontinental railroad, spanning over 50,000 miles across 43 states and connecting roughly 100 ports in North America. Englewood stands to be directly and significantly impacted by this merger because Norfolk Southern’s already expanding 47th Street railyard, is situated at the heart of the neighborhood and set to absorb substantially increased train and truck traffic. This surge in activity risks worsened air and noise pollution, heightened traffic congestion, and accelerated industrial encroachment into the community, ultimately displacing residents and further eroding the quality of life in an already overburdened area.
So far in this proceeding, EAC students have conducted expert interviews, analyzed technical information, and conducted meetings with SEI and the City of Chicago. As the proceeding progresses, students will also submit multiple rounds of formal comments and work with an interdisciplinary team of Northwestern experts in transportation engineering, data sciences, and air quality.
Protecting Free, Unrestricted Access to the Public Lake for Illinois Residents
People throughout Illinois are united in their appreciation of free public access to Lake Michigan, yet, attacks on access to the lake are numerous throughout the city and in Illinois. The EAC is representing a North Shore resident who is challenging the Illinois Department of Natural Resource’s (IDNR) decision to issue a permit to the Winnetka Park District allowing it to construct fences into Lake Michigan and across a beach which will significantly block public access to the community's valued public beachfront.
The EAC argues that IDNR issuing the permit is a violation of the public trust doctrine, an ancient legal doctrine holding that the state holds public trust lands (including Lake Michigan) in trust for all the people and future generations, and the state must not give away such lands for private purposes. This case is representative of a broader pattern of IDNR enabling the effective privatization of the lake front.
EAC students have driven this litigation effort since it began, evaluating whether to take the case, drafting multiple briefs and an amended complaint, and working directly with the client to understand their objectives and prepare factual filings.
Litigation Against Coal Mine Pollution and Undue Private Interest Priority
The EAC’s ongoing litigation against the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA), supports clients at the Sierra Club and Prairie Rivers Network they look to to prevent the federal government from expanding coal mining in rural Southern Illinois and selling mineral rights to foreign private interests. The EAC’s clients’ members include property owners and residents near the mine, facing destroyed land, toxic pollutants, and dangerous discharges into local rivers and a drinking water reservoir from the mineas well as recreators whose experiences in local waterways and with local wildlife is being diminished. This is all not to mention the tremendous climate change implications of continuing to mine massive amounts of coal to burn.
So far, EAC students have conducted over a dozen of witness interviews, drafted the complex complaint to file in federal court, and authored briefs to fight off initial motions to dismiss.
Fighting to Plug Thousands of Orphaned Oil Wells Emitting Pollution Across Illinois
The EAC worked with international nonprofit ClientEarth to assess and improve the regulatory framework governing the closure of inactive oil wells in Illinois. There are over 6,000 wells in Illinois that require immediate closure, 4,000 of which are formally orphaned by corporate owners. Over 100,000 wells that are not tracked or monitored systematically. Inactive wells create both localized environmental harms such as poisoning drinking water and fouling productive farmland, as well as larger-scale harms including contributing to climate change via the release of methane gas. And, when a private owner shirks their responsibility to properly close a well, that expense is shifted to taxpayers, a fiscal impact that the EAC and ClientEarth uncovered could exceed $1 billion.
Students in the clinic authored a report identifying issues with the current statutory framework, suggestions for legislative change, and potential private and public actions to bring suit against owners who have not fulfilled their responsibility to plug inactive wells and remediate the land. They also hosted a webinar with the Illinois Environmental Council for over 100 environmental attorneys, to engage in a presentation and discussion about the report and proposed reforms.
Facilitating Multi-year Integrated Grid Plans and Vehicle Electrification
The EAC represents the Respiratory Health Association in ongoing proceedings with ComEd and Ameren and their proposed Multi-Year Integrated Grid Plans to ensure those plans comply with the state’s ambitious vehicle electrification goals updated most recently in the 2025 Clean and Reliable Grid Affordability Act (CRGA). The EAC has supported testimony to identify the critical need to support electric school bus deployment, medium and heavy duty fleet electrification, and residential charger and rebate programs, all in ways that prioritize low-income communities and communities in environmental justice areas.
In this work before the Illinois Commerce Commission, EAC students have worked with experts to evaluate utility plans and develop testimony, as well as draft legal analyses to support urging the Commission to require improvements to the utilities’ plans.
Fighting for Environmental Justice on Chicago's Southeast Side
The Environmental Advocacy Center (EAC) represents Southeast Environmental Task Force (SETF), a community organization advocating to preserve, protect, and restore natural resources on Chicago's Southeast Side, an area long burdened by industrial pollution. Past efforts include winning stricter controls on petroleum coke storage, and for monitoring and control of manganese handling operations, a neurotoxin found at elevated levels in local air.
SETF's Stop General Iron Campaign opposed relocating the General Iron scrap metal facility from Lincoln Park—where it had drawn environmental violations and community opposition—to the Southeast Side. Working alongside People for Community Recovery and the Southeast Side Coalition to Ban Petcoke, EAC filed permit comments, testified before Illinois EPA and CDPH, and engaged federal, state, and city legislators. This advocacy helped convince CDPH to deny the facility's permit in May 2021 (now under appeal by RMG, which acquired General Iron's assets). EAC also helped file civil rights complaints with the USEPA and HUD. he latter complaint resulted in a landmark May 2022 settlement with the City, setting a national precedent for community-led remedies to structural environmental racism. The USEPA civil rights complaint led to a settlement with Illinois EPA in 2024, which was recently incorporated into state law during the 2026 legislative session. The EAC has also filed numerous briefs on behalf of SETF and PCR in various litigation matters that have arisen from the City’s denial of General Iron’s operating permit.
EAC students participate in every aspect of this work: client engagement, strategy, advocacy, brief-drafting, live testimony, settlement negotiations, and all of the necessary legal, policy and factual research.
Protecting the Chicago River by Suing Trump Tower
The EAC is proud to represent Friends of the Chicago River (FOCR) and the Sierra Club Illinois (SC IL), in conjunction with Abrams Environmental Law Clinic at the University of Chicago Law School, in the matter of the People of the State of Illinois v. 401 N. Wabash Venture, LLC, LLC, 18-CH-10229 (Cook County Chancery). The case started in 2018, when our clients discovered that Trump Tower in downtown Chicago was withdrawing up to 20 million gallons of Chicago River water every day without ever applying for the proper federal permit. After EAC lawyers and our clients announced a formal intent to sue Trump Tower to force it into compliance, the State of Illinois filed suit against Trump International for Clean Water Act (“CWA”) violations. After seven years of intense litigation, in the summer of 2025, Trump Tower agreed to settle the case, committing to ceasing its illegal water withdrawals and paying a state-record civil penalty of $4.5 million, $3 million of which will be directed to habitat projects in the Chicago River.
Students participated centrally in every phase of this litigation. Students assisted in the discovery process by conducting research, reviewing technical and business documents, drafting written discovery requests, drafting discovery motions–and arguing them in court, and both assisting and independently taking fact and expert depositions. Students also participated in strategy discussions with clients and engaged with experts across different fields such as ecology and economics. Students were also key authors of a successful summary judgment brief on liability that led directly to the groundbreaking settlement.
Opposing More Trash Trucks Driving through an Environmental Justice Community in West Chicago
The EAC represented People Opposing DuPage Environmental Racism (PODER), a part of Immigrant Solidarity for DuPage, a grassroots community organization whose mission, is to educate, organize and mobilize the Latino community in DuPage County. The PODER subcommittee works to combat environmental injustice and racism in their local community. 52% of households in West Chicago, the only majority-minority community in DuPage county, speak a language other than English in the home.
In September 2022, Lakeshore Recycling Systems (LRS) proposed expanding its facility in the City of West Chicago to create a waste transfer station for municipal garbage. The expansion, most notably, would produce disproportionate environmental burdens upon the predominantly minority city of West Chicago by dramatically increasing diesel truck traffic for the benefit of handling the waste of a predominantly white service area. EAC represented PODER in public hearings in front of the City of West Chicago in January 2023, after which the City Council adopted the report of the hearing officer and enacted an ordinance approving LRS’s waste transfer station in February 2023. PODER then appealed the City Council’s approval of LRS’s application to the Illinois Pollution Control Board. After the Pollution Control Board reversed the City’s approval on a procedural issue, a state appellate court upheld the Board’s decision and LRS’s facility remains unapproved.
EAC students prepared clients for live testimony, conducted opening arguments and direct examinations during hearings, drafted pleadings and multiple complex legal briefs the City Council and Illinois Pollution Control Board, and led regular consultations with the client. After the Pollution Control Board’s ruling, state legislators reached out and asked the EAC to develop legislative language to rectify some of the problems PODER pointed out in the proceeding - such as the lack of language access; EAC students provided the initial draft of legislation that was enacted into state law in 2024.
Advancing Community Priorities in a Federal Hazardous Waste Cleanup in DePue, Illinois
The EAC represents the Village of DePue, a town of 1,800, composed of largely low-income residents, located in central Illinois. DePue was left contaminated with dangerous heavy metals after decades of industrial operations—including a zinc smelter, fertilizer manufacturing operations, and lithopone paint manufacturing—ended in the 1980s. DePue was designated as one of the most contaminated and dangerous places for people and the environment in the United States in 1999, as a Superfund site.
Since then, EAC students pushed enforcement agencies and the responsible companies to conduct an appropriate cleanup of the contamination in DePue through advocacy strategies. Students researched and drafted analysis, consulted extensively with diverse scientific experts, prepared reports alongside the experts, and produced original formal comments, advocacy pieces, and promotion of media coverage. Collaborating with the Northwestern Chemistry Department and Groundswell Educational Films, the EAC created an interactive website www.cleanupdepue.org, that enables users to click on specific locations on a map of DePue to determine what contaminants are present and the dangers the contaminants pose. Most recently, an EAC student worked with an environmental consultant to develop a presentation for community members, reflecting the complex legal and technical issues of remediating the Village’s prized, namesake lake to the U.S. EPA and state regulators.
