Nathalie Margaret Walker

Nathalie Margaret (“Tally”) Walker, 67, died April 10, 2018 at her home in New Orleans.  Born in Ohio and raised in the Midwest, she resided in New Orleans for the past forty years. She graduated in 1972 from the Honors Program at the University of Michigan (Ann Arbor) where she majored in English Language and Literature and was a member of the Kappa Kappa Gamma sorority.  In 1973, she obtained her Master’s degree in English at Michigan, where she met and married, in 1975, her husband of 42 years, Stevan Dittman. She graduated with Honors from Tulane University School of Law in 1981 where she was a member of the Tulane Law Review and the Order of the Coif.  After serving as a law clerk to the late Judge Fred Cassibry of the United States District Court for the Eastern District of Louisiana, she practiced law and was a partner at the Gordon, Arata, McCollam law firm in New Orleans. Thereafter she became the first  Managing Attorney for the Sierra Club Legal Defense Fund’s (Earthjustice)  New Orleans office where she specialized in environmental law, litigating cases that got lead removed from drinking water in the New Orleans public schools, that resulted in the Louisiana Black Bear’s being listed on the Threatened  Species list, and where, representing the citizens of Homer, Louisiana, a historic African American community, she won a landmark environmental justice lawsuit before the Federal Nuclear Regulatory Commission. She went on to cofound Advocates for Environmental Justice, a public interest law firm, with which she  continued to represent citizens affected disparately by environmental pollution. In 1998-1999 she served as Chair of the Louisiana State Bar Association’s Section on Environmental Law. She was preceded in death by her parents, David and Martha Walker, her brother Casey William Walker, and her son, Christian Walker Dittman. She is survived by husband, Stevan, and their son, Anderson Walker Dittman, her daughter-in-law- Elizabeth Cable Dittman, and her  two grandchildren, Anna Elizabeth Dittman and Anderson Christian Dittman, six siblings, Felice Gavin, Cynthia Ann Coble, Martha Shuman, David M. Walker, Laura Fedele, and Kelly Scheckler,. A funeral mass and memorial service will be scheduled in the future at St. George’s Episcopal Church in New Orleans, where Nathalie formerly served as a member of the vestry

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