About Our Guest

Cale Jaffe is the Director of the Virginia Office of the Southern Environmental Law Center or SELC, a nonprofit organization which utilizes the weight of the law to safeguard air, water and the unique ecosystems throughout the southeast. Cale received a BA from Yale University in American Studies and a JD and MA in Legal History from the University of Virginia. Cale Jaffe has been an attorney with SELC since 2004. From 2006 to 2013 Cale served as a lecturer at the University of Virginia Law School where he taught a seminar on Environmental Law and Federalism. Among his numerous academic and bar publications are “The Toxic Legacy of Coal Ash on Southeastern Rivers”, William and Mary Environmental Law and Policy Review which is forthcoming in 2016, and “Air in the Balance: Rewriting the Clean Air Act’s New Source Review Program”, Virginia Lawyer, 2005. In 2007 he was a member of the SELC legal team that achieved a unanimous victory before the U.S. Supreme Court in environmental defense versus Duke Energy. In 2014, Cale was appointed by Virginia Governor Terry McAuliffe to serve on the Governor’s Climate Change and Resiliency Update Commission.

Program Transcript

Jan Paynter: Hello. I’m Jan Paynter and I would like to welcome you once again to our program Politics Matters. Today we are so pleased to welcome back to the program Cale Jaffe, Director of the Virginia Office of the Southern Environmental Law Center to continue discussing the environment in our wonderful state of Virginia. Welcome back, Cale.

Cale Jaffe: Thanks very much for having me.

Jan Paynter: Cale, based on your experience working on the Duke Energy case, how challenging is it from a legal point of view to achieve standing in environmental cases allowing them to go forward?

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