Education

J.D., Columbus School of Law, Catholic University

B.A., The College of Notre Dame of Maryland

Admissions

District of Columbia

U.S. District Court: District of Columbia

U.S. Court of Appeals: District of Columbia Circuit, Third Circuit, Fourth Circuit, Eleventh Circuit

U.S. Supreme Court 

Carolyn Smith Pravlik

Partner

(202) 204-8475

Carolyn Smith Pravlik has over forty years’ experience litigating complex cases in the federal courts at all judicial levels.  She joined Terris, Pravlik & Millian, LLP (then Terris & Sunderland) as an associate in 1981 after being fired by Ronald Reagan’s environmentally hostile Secretary of the Interior, James Watt.  Since 1982, Ms. Pravlik has spearheaded the firm’s citizen suit practice.  The firm has litigated over 100 citizen suits under the Clean Water Act, Clean Air Act, and the Resource Conservation and Recovery Act (RCRA), many of which consume years – often a decade or more – to litigate.

Ms. Pravlik was the primary author of the briefs filed before the Supreme Court in Friends of the Earth v. Laidlaw Envtl. Services (TOC), Inc., 528 U.S. 167 (2000), an important decision holding that citizens have standing to pursue violations of the Clean Water Act and that the evidentiary showing for standing cannot be higher than that for the merits.  She and Bruce J. Terris represented Friends of the Earth, Sierra Club, and CLEAN before the district court, the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals, and the Supreme Court in that case.

Since the early 2000s, most of Ms. Pravlik’s citizen suit work has focused on cases with both RCRA and Clean Water Act (CWA) claims.  A representative case is PennEnvironment v. PPG Industries, Inc., a citizen suit under RCRA’s imminent and substantial endangerment provision and under the Clean Water Act for the discharge of pollutants for almost five decades without an NPDES permit authorizing PPG’s discharges.  PennEnvironment v. PPG Industries, Inc., 23 F. Supp. 3d 553 (W.D. Pa. 2014) (granting plaintiffs summary judgment on the issue of standing); PennEnvironment v. PPG Industries, Inc., No. 12-342, 2014 WL 6982461 (W.D. Pa. Dec. 10, 2014) (granting a mandatory preliminary injunction requiring PPG to apply for an NPDES permit); PennEnvironment v. PPG Industries, Inc., 127 F. Supp. 3d 336 (W.D. Pa. 2015) (granting plaintiffs summary judgment on RCRA and CWA liability regarding the SLA area of the site); PennEnvironment v. PPG Industries, Inc., No. 12-342, 2018 WL 1784555 (W.D. Pa. Apr. 13, 2018) (granting plaintiffs summary judgment on RCRA liability regarding the SWDA area of the site); PennEnvironment v. PPG Industries, Inc., No. 12-342, 2019 WL 2210692 (W.D. Pa. May 22, 2019), recons. denied, 2019 WL 4860940 (W.D. Pa. Oct. 2, 2019) (denying PPG’s motion to dismiss plaintiffs’ RCRA claims as futile); PennEnvironment v. PPG Industries, Inc., 587 F. Supp. 3d 286, 305 (W.D. Pa. 2022) (denying PPG’s motion for summary judgment on mootness grounds and granting plaintiffs’ motion for summary judgment on additional CWA violations).

Another example is Interfaith Committee Organization v. Honeywell International, Inc., Civ. No. 95-2097 (D.N.J.), a RCRA and CWA citizen suit.  After litigating the initial phases of that suit, Ms. Pravlik returned to litigation against Honeywell when she supervised the firm’s litigation of the follow-on case against Honeywell for the contamination of seven additional sites in Jersey City, New Jersey.  Hackensack Riverkeeper v. Honeywell International, Inc., Civ. No. 06-0022 (consolidated under Civ. Nos. 95-2097) (D.N.J).  The follow-on case involved the City of Jersey City and several of its agencies, several businesses, several homeowners, and a university, in addition to Honeywell.  She and the TPM team negotiated multiple consent decrees requiring Honeywell’s remediation of its hexavalent chromium contamination.  She oversaw the post-decree negotiation of financial assurances and institutional controls designed to protect, in perpetuity, the engineering controls used as part of the remediation.  The firm continues to monitor the remediation work and Ms. Pravlik is periodically consulted about the issues that arise.

Over the decades, Ms. Pravlik’s citizen suit work has resulted in several decisions of first impression under the Clean Water Act, including the first decisions imposing the then-current statutory maximum civil penalty of $10,000 per violation.  SPIRG v. Monsanto Co., 600 F. Supp. 1479 (D.N.J. 1985) (first decision awarding summary judgment on liability issues and upholding the constitutionality of the citizen suit provision); SPIRG v. Monsanto Co., 29 ERC 1988 (D.N.J. 1988) (penalties); SPIRG v. Hercules, Inc., 29 ERC 1417 (D.N.J. 1989) (penalties); PIRG v. Powell Duffryn Terminals, Inc., 720 F. Supp. 1158 (1989), affirmed, 913 F.2d 64 (3d Cir. 1990) (penalties).  Ms. Pravlik also obtained the first decision in the country requiring a concentrated animal feeding operation (CAFO) to apply for an NPDES permit.  American Canoe Association v. Murphy Farms, Civ. No. 7:98-cv-4, 1998 U.S. Dist. LEXIS 21402 (E.D.N.C. Dec. 22, 1998), appeal dismissed in part and remanded in part, 210 F.3d 360 (4th Cir. 2000) (Table, text reported at 2000 WL 328027). 

Alongside her environmental citizen suit work at TPM, Ms. Pravlik has been involved in the litigation of several civil rights class actions.  Ms. Pravlik also litigates attorneys’ fees issues under the fee-shifting statutes in citizen suits and civil rights actions.  See, e.g., Interfaith Community Organization v. Honeywell International, Inc., 426 F.3d 694 (3d Cir. 2005); DL v. District of Columbia, 924 F.3d 585 (D.C. Cir. 2019).

Ms. Pravlik is frequently invited to speak on citizen suits and related topics.