Celebrating and carrying forward the legacy of Professor Rebecca Bratspies and the Center for Urban Environmental Reform
CUNY School of Law convened policymakers, community advocates, and environmental leaders on December 8 for The Environmental Future of Western Queens, an evening that explored the interlocking environmental, infrastructure, and justice challenges facing the borough and marked a pivotal transition for the Center for Urban Environmental Reform (CUER). The event recognized the leadership of CUER’s founding director, Professor Rebecca Bratspies, whose tenure has shaped the Law School’s community-grounded approach to environmental justice, as she prepares to step into a new national role while remaining connected to CUER’s long-term vision.
Interim Dean Natalie Gomez-Velez opened the program by framing the evening around the systems that define daily life: “the air we breathe, the energy we use, the land we protect, and the justice we pursue” and emphasized that Western Queens, with its diversity, infrastructure, and environmental burdens, reflects both the urgency and the promise of community-driven environmental justice.
Drawing on CUER’s mission, the Interim Dean highlighted that environmental justice at CUNY Law “is part of a broader commitment to train lawyers who serve human needs — including the health of the environments our community calls home.” Queens, she noted, is “where the global meets the local,” making it the right place for a conversation grounded in the lived experience of residents pushing for change. The law school, she noted, is part of the civic fabric of Queens, and its students learn not by observing but by participating.
“As the founding director of the Center for Urban Environmental Reform, Rebecca built something rare: a space where environmental law is practiced with communities rather than directed at them, where research is grounded in lived experience, and where students learn that environmental justice cannot be separated from social justice,” remarked Interim Dean Gomez-Velez. “She has shown that civic participation and public education are as essential to environmental justice as litigation or legislation. CUER b ecame a place where neighborhood concerns, agency processes, and the law meet in real time, and that is the legacy she leaves for our students and for the institution.”
That framing became a throughline for the event. As panelists described the environmental realities facing Western Queens, the urgency was unmistakable. Elevated asthma rates west of 21st Street, the continued operation of the city’s largest fossil-fuel plant, chronic combined sewer overflows (CSOs), and the near-total absence of accessible green space form a landscape where environmental burdens fall disproportionately on immigrant, working-class, and Black and Brown communities. CSOs were a particular point of concern; during moderate to heavy rain, untreated sewage is discharged directly into local waterways, creating serious public-health risks and compounding long-standing environmental harms. Even neighborhood parks, many of which sit atop contaminated soil, function as both essential public space and evidence of long-standing disinvestment. Speakers made clear that these conditions cannot be separated from housing, health, and economic inequality: infrastructure, in Western Queens, is a map of accumulated choices about who is protected and who is left exposed.
The evening’s core conversation unfolded through a panel moderated by Professor Bratspies and Costa Constantinides, the CEO of Variety Boys & Girls Club and Former City Council Member, Council Member Julie Won, and Jessica Sechrist Executive Director of the Hunters Point Parks Conservancy.
Council Member Won, a consistent advocate for CUNY Law whose recent six-million dollar capital investment strengthens the school’s ability to serve the borough, described the strain placed on Western Queens when large-scale renewable investments are delayed at higher levels of government. She noted that her district faces contaminated parks, aging stormwater systems, rising heat, and the lowest open-space ratios in the city. Her priority is to acquire and protect land for public use and to require development that advances climate resilience rather than merely adding green aesthetics. For Won, environmental justice is inseparable from housing stability, public health, and neighborhood planning.
Sechrist described what those policy choices look like on the ground, from extreme heat and limited tree canopy to contaminated parks and aging stormwater systems. Constantinides connected those conditions to concrete legislative pathways and to the work CUER students have already done on environmental justice mapping and Renewable Rikers. During a Q&A, the panelists discussed how to secure affordable housing while increasing open space, how to use zoning and waterfront rules to build climate resilience, how to integrate native species and functional green infrastructure into dense neighborhoods, and how lawyers, organizers, and voters can move reluctant institutions. The exchange confirmed CUNY Law’s role as a place where legal education, public policy, and community power are in active conversation.
The conversation repeatedly returned to a core truth that has long animated CUER’s work: climate policy succeeds only when it is shaped by those who directly experience its consequences. It is within this landscape that CUER, and Bratspies’ leadership, have become essential.
CUER’s earliest projects blended law, art, and science to reach young people whose neighborhoods bore the marks of environmental racism but whose voices had been historically excluded from environmental discourse. The Environmental Justice Chronicles and Mayah’s Lot, co-created with New York City public school students and artist Charlie LaGreca-Velasco, became national teaching tools, used in classrooms ranging from elementary schools to graduate seminars. More importantly, they provided a platform for thousands of young people to identify environmental harms in their own communities and create campaigns for change. The EPA honored this work for its national impact, affirming what CUNY students and neighborhood partners already knew: environmental justice requires storytelling as much as litigation.
Over time, CUER expanded into an engine of community-engaged legal advocacy. Through CUER and Professor Bratspies’s classes, CUNY Law students testified before the New York City Council, drafted testimony for community partners, participated in federal and state rulemaking processes, helped develop and implement the city’s environmental justice laws, contributed to the passage of the environmental rights amendment to the New York State Constitution, and supported global efforts to codify the human right to a healthy environment. True to the Law School’s ethos, students were not just preparing for practice but doing the work of advocates and attorneys long before they graduated.
Nowhere has CUER’s model been more visible than in its work on Renewable Rikers. In partnership with directly impacted communities and then–City Council Member Costa Constantinides, CUER students helped produce a comprehensive report envisioning the transformation of Rikers Island from a site of mass incarceration into a hub for renewable energy production and modern wastewater treatment. The project reframes land use as a form of restorative justice, shifting environmental burdens away from the same communities long harmed by policing, incarceration, and pollution. It is the kind of ambitious, community-rooted legal work that CUNY Law is known for throughout New York City and within legal education nationally.
Bratspies reflected on her work with CUER, saying she felt the center had succeeded “beyond my wildest dreams” because students and communities made the work their own. She reminded the audience that the environmental burdens facing overpoliced and under-resourced neighborhoods are not natural—they are legal. And if law can authorize harm, law can also be rewritten to repair it.
“I started the Center for Urban Environmental Reform with two goals,” shared Professor Bratspies. “The first was to use art, science, and law to build a new generation of environmental leaders who are focused on the urban environment — the places where people live, work, play, and pray, and the people who were left out of the first version of environmental protection that focused on wild spaces. The second was to work alongside overburdened communities as they advocate for change. It has been successful beyond my wildest dreams. The passion and vision that young people bring to environmental advocacy is remarkable, and it gives me hope.”
As she prepares to become the inaugural Oliver Houck Chair in Environmental Law at Tulane University, Bratspies will continue her work with CUER as Chair of its new advisory committee, ensuring that her vision remains embedded in the Center’s long-term arc.
The evening also welcomed Constantinides to CUER and CUNY Law. A leader behind some of the most ambitious climate legislation in New York City, including the Climate Mobilization Act, Constantinides brings both legislative experience and deep community roots. He spoke movingly about Bratspies as a mentor and partner and what excites him about teaching at CUNY Law this spring and carrying her legacy forward through CUER: “In the darkness, we’re the holders of each other’s candles. When someone’s light goes out, when discouragement sets in, it’s our responsibility to walk over and help reignite it,” said Constantinides. “That’s the legacy we’re continuing here: keeping that light alive, helping our students carry it forward in their own advocacy and policy work. I’ve been fortunate to work alongside people in government who are committed to real change, and to work with an icon like Rebecca Bratspies.”
Constantinides recounted successes he and Bratspies, along with her students, shared, from quieting the MTA’s N line tracks near a local school in Long Island City to passing long-stalled environmental justice legislation with critical support from CUNY Law students. He emphasized that communities in Western Queens still face profound environmental challenges, and that CUNY Law is uniquely positioned to elevate the voices that should be at the forefront of policy. His commitment is not simply to continue CUER’s work but to expand opportunities for students to shape climate governance in real time.
What emerged over the course of the evening was not just admiration for Bratspies or excitement for Constantinides, but a recognition that CUER exemplifies what makes CUNY Law distinct. It represents an approach to legal education in which faculty and students analyze systems of power and then find ways to intervene in them and reshape them. Students work alongside impacted people whose expertise comes from lived experience. They draft legislation that reflects community priorities and builds community power. They learn, from the beginning, that law is neither neutral nor inevitable: it is a set of choices, and lawyers trained in partnership with communities can help change those choices.
The program closed with a sense of shared purpose. Attendees lingered long after the formal remarks ended, discussing policy, organizing, and the work ahead. The transition in CUER’s leadership is not a closing chapter, but an invitation to imagine what becomes possible when a law school understands itself as a civic institution, accountable to the communities around it, and committed to using legal education as a lever for justice.
