Founding Failures: Reckoning with our Constitution’s Generational Impacts on Health and Well-Being

Our Constitution's establishment of a racial caste system left a legacy that can be seen generations later in its impact on the health and well-being of communities of color. Exploitative scientific studies, inferior medical care, and discriminatorily designed infrastructure and environmental policy have wreaked havoc on the bodies of Black, Indigenous, and LatinX Americans. As we look to fight our latest urgent public health challenges, COVID-19 and climate change, what law and policy tools are available to address the disproportionate harms borne by communities of color? What new legal authorities are needed? And what can state and federal enforcement agencies do, more broadly, to help close the racial gap in our public health policy and to enhance environmental justice?

Opening Remarks:

Russ Feingold, ACS President

Featuring:

Christophe Courchesne, Assistant Attorney General, Massachusetts Attorney General's Office

Zinelle October, Executive Vice President, ACS, Moderator

Chandra Taylor, Senior Attorney and Leader of the Environmental Justice Initiative, Southern Environmental Law Center

Ruqaiijah Yearby, Professor of Law and Executive Director of the Institute for Healing Justice and Equity, St. Louis University School of Law

This event has been approved for 1 hour of California CLE credit.

Find reading materials here, as well as Evaluation Form, Certificate of Attendance, and Record of Attendance.

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