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Jimmy Chandler, top S.C. environmental attorney, dies
Conservationist Jimmy Chandler, the underdog lawyer who battled big corporations and influential developers in S.C. courts for nearly three decades, died Saturday night after an eight-month battle with cancer.
Chandler, of Pawleys Island, was 60.
Since the early 1980s, the unflappable Chandler had been the face of environmental law in South Carolina's Lowcountry and a leading advocate of protecting the marshes, beaches, rivers and lakes that define the Palmetto State.
His groundbreaking legal work stopped dredging projects in salt marshes, bridges through swamps, toxic waste sites in poor communities, and most recently, the coming of mega-garbage dumps in rural S.C. counties.
In the mid-1980s, Chandler won a landmark case in Georgetown County that has since prevented developers from digging canals through South Carolina's vast coastal tidelands. Many consider the Willbrook dredging case one of the most important in coastal environmental law.