Sheila Foster
Sheila Foster is the Albert A. Walsh Professor of Law at Fordham University and Co-Director of the Stein Center for Law and Ethics. From 1994-2001, she was a Professor of Law at the Rutgers University in Camden, New Jersey. She received her B.A. in English, with honors, from the University of Michigan-Ann Arbor and her J.D. in from Boalt Hall School of Law at the University of California-Berkeley.
Professor Foster is the author of numerous publications on civil rights/constitutional law, race and legal theory, and environmental law. Her primary scholarship, however, is dedicated to exploring the intersection of civil rights and environmental law, in a field called Aenvironmental justice.@ The movement for environmental justice has called attention to the widespread inequitable distribution of a variety of environmental hazards (hazardous wastes, air pollution, lead, etc.) on low-income and minority communities. Professor Foster=s scholarship carefully delineates the legal, political, economic and social forces in producing this inequitable distribution and suggests legal reforms to alleviate it.
She has published in top law reviews, including the California Law Review and the Harvard Environmental Law Review. Professor Foster is a coauthor (with Luke Cole of the Center for Race, Poverty and the Environment) of the book From the Ground Up: Environmental Racism and the Rise of the Environmental Justice Movement, published by N.Y.U Press (2001; second edition forthcoming in 2009). She is also co-editor (with Michael Gerrard) of The Law of Environmental Justice: Theories and Procedures to Address Disproportionate Risks (ABA, 2008)
Her most recent work extends her interest in environmental justice to issues of urban development more broadly. This is reflected in her two most recent article, The City as Ecological Space: Social Capital and Urban Land Use, in Notre Dame Law Review (2006), and Integrative Lawyering: Navigating the Political Economy of Urban Development (with B. Glick), in the California Law Review (2007). These articles are designed to open up a larger conversation around certain contested issues of urban land use, such as gentrification and environmental justice, to embrace overlooked aspects of these disputes, such as the impact of land use decisions on a community’s social capital.
Professor Foster has worked with, and on behalf of, a number of environmental justice community-based organizations in New York, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania. She has been awarded two grants by the Ford Foundation for projects on urban regional equity and international environmental justice. She is also a scholar member of the Center for Progressive Regulation, a nonprofit research and educational organization dedicated to protecting health, safety, and the environment through analysis and commentary.