No federal constitutional environmental-justice claim has ever prevailed

Evidence

Courts have significantly watered down civil rights laws in the past twenty years, so what appears to the average person to be a clear civil rights violation might not fit the narrow legal definition of such a violation. As we discussed in chapter 3, courts have ruled that a government action that might have a discriminatory impact is not unconstitutional unless the decision maker had a discriminatory intent, something that is very hard to prove. Consequently, no plaintiff has prevailed in alleging a federal constitutional violation in an environmental justice suit, although this strategy has been tried in numerous jurisdictions around the country. — Luke W. Cole and Sheila R. Foster, From the Ground Up, 573

Categorization

• XREF: Pays off the ch7 claim that courts reject impact-based claims absent proven intentional discrimination — here its concrete consequence: zero constitutional wins. — connects to: Legal remedies consistently fail to aid communities in environmental justice struggles; Chester jeopardized private citizens’ right to sue under Title VI regulations; The Constitution contains no textual support for environmental protection’s core aims — Richard J. Lazarus, The Making of Environmental Law, 200 (+1 more)
• corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim — Luke W. Cole and Sheila R. Foster, From the Ground Up: Environmental…, 573

Broader Connections

• Courts reject impact-based environmental racism claims absent proven intentional discrimination #expands (0.82) — Luke W. Cole and Sheila R. Foster, From the Ground Up, 327
• The Constitution contains no textual support for environmental protection’s core aims #corroborates (0.80) — Richard J. Lazarus, The Making of Environmental Law, 200