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Environmental Watchdog

John Cruden ’74 is chief of the environmental enforcement section for the U.S. Department of Justice

John Cruden

When John Cruden’s legal career zeroed in on environmental protection, he didn’t start with roadside litter or recycled bottles. He took on a whole island atoll—and one devastated by nuclear bomb testing at that. Cruden, who now is the nation’s top career environmental lawyer at the Department of Justice as well as president-elect of the District of Columbia Bar, was a military lawyer—general counsel to the Defense Nuclear Agency—when he took on the huge cleanup of Eniwetok Atoll. Removing the island-wide contamination and building new homes for the Marshall Islanders, he now says, “really made me very interested in what you could do positively for people in the environmental area.”

That was more than two decades back, and today, as deputy assistant attorney general for environmental and natural resources, Cruden ’74 (summa cum laude), has the opportunity to pursue his goal daily. Cruden oversees hundreds of lawyers who file on average one lawsuit a day against polluters and others who flout the nation’s environmental laws. “Any civil case involving the United States and the environment in the country—I have involvement in it,” he says. Whether it’s enforcing cleanup of Superfund sites, forcing refineries to install anti-pollution equipment or suing the nation’s capital to fix its sewage system and clean up the Anacostia River, Cruden’s team is on the case.

Environmental law was still embryonic when Cruden, a West Point graduate and decorated Special Forces veteran, passed the bar. He had learned about Santa Clara’s law school from a graduate who talked it up while both men were soldiers in Vietnam. Cruden took the LSAT in Saigon and won a leave to attend Santa Clara. Back on active duty, he continued his education at the Army’s graduate law program, where he was named outstanding graduate while also earning a masters degree in government and foreign affairs from the University of Virginia. By 1991 when he retired from the military as chief legislative counsel for the Army, he had developed an environmental law specialty during years of litigating. Along the way, he also had a role in cracking the case of the 1989 political murder of six Jesuits in El Salvador, helping to facilitate a U.S. major’s testimony about Salvadoran military involvement.

After the Army, Cruden landed at the Department of Justice where he soon became chief of the environmental enforcement section, supervising the department’s largest litigation section and working on landmark cases like the Exxon Valdez spill in Alaska and the conclusion of the long-running Love Canal case. Elevated to his current post in 1995, he is a two-time recipient of the prestigious Presidential Rank Award.

Last fall, Cruden, 58, became the first government attorney elected president of the D.C. Bar, which at 79,000 members is the nation’s second largest bar association, after California. Among his goals: to expand the group’s pro-bono programs and to increase access to the justice system for the poor and disadvantaged.

Rita Beamish B.A.’74