Wild Faith
Christen E. Civiletto is an attorney with more than twenty-five years of experience in all phases of litigation and arbitration matters on both the state- and federal-court level. As a non-equity partner at national law firms in Atlanta, Georgia, she co-managed an innovative alternative dispute resolution program for a worldwide office supply corporation. She also handled complex commercial and intellectual property matters. She is currently counsel of record in multiple high-profile mass toxic tort cases pending in federal and state courts.
Ms. Civiletto is a member of the United States District Court’s federal mediator panel, and is a certified meditator and arbitrator. She has been an adjunct faculty member at the University at Buffalo Law School for more than seventeen years. She received the 2017 Ken Joyce Award for Excellence in Teaching.
Ms. Civiletto is a summa cum laude graduate of SUNY Buffalo, where she received a joint Bachelor of Arts degree in political science and communication. She earned her J.D. degree from Vanderbilt University Law School in Nashville, Tennessee.
She co-authored The Practice of Law School: Getting In and Making The Most of Your Legal Education (ALM, 2003). She authored Full Disclosure: The New Lawyer’s Must-Read Career Guide (ALM, 2001), a practical mentoring guide for first through fourth year lawyers, as well as recent works of fiction.
She is licensed in both New York and Georgia.
author
Releasing 6.30.26!
How corporate kingpins built their empires by poisoning a treasured natural wonder
Few images from the natural world conjure the same awe, power, and amazement as Niagara Falls. Each year, millions flock from around the world to hear the roar of the falls, feel and smell the spray, and maybe take in the sight up close by boat. What they don’t know—nor do most of the locals—is that the city of Niagara Falls is the setting of one of the most shocking and horrific tales of environmental desecration of the past hundred plus years.
By virtue of the Falls’ might, Niagara Falls was the birthplace of the commercial electro-chemical industry—and for decades, those massive corporations dumped, buried, vented, incinerated, and piled their millions of tons of toxic and radioactive wastes in the surrounding farmlands, rivers, meadows, and empty lots. Venture minutes from the waterfall, and you’ll find the bones of a decrepit city. Its residents are plagued by major health problems, often at rates that far exceed state and national averages. The harm is ongoing and generational. As in all such cases, the poor and marginalized bear the brunt of the injury.
Environmental attorney Christen Civiletto relates how the major chemical kingpins of the twentieth century relentlessly and indiscriminately laid waste to Niagara Falls in her eye-opening, harrowing, intimate new book, Thundering Waters: The Toxic Legacy of Niagara Falls. Expertly interweaving environmental crime, history, and memoir, Thundering Waters exposes the astonishing story of exploitation and ongoing abuse lurking in the shadows of one of the world’s most treasured natural wonders.