If you’ve gone shopping lately, you may have seen a creeping number of warning labels affixed to faux leather jackets, jewelry, even bathing suits. These labels, which ominously suggest that the product could give you cancer, all trace back to a single California law: Proposition 65.

A shift began in the late 1960s, when a series of oil spills changed how California discussed water contamination. In 1968, when a corporate leak into the Dominguez Channel provoked a meager $100 fine, the Los Angeles Times complained that the state was “in serious danger of losing the fight against pollution of its irreplaceable water resources.”

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Environmentalists across the state made similar impressions. When Deborah Ann Sivas started filing lawsuits under Proposition 65, she couldn’t believe her luck. After a decade of working as an environmental lawyer, she was landing meetings with multinational corporations who suddenly seemed afraid of her.

“Some companies dug in their heels and said, ‘This is outrageous, we’re going to fight this,” says Sivas. “But others came to the table and had serious conversations about reformulating their products.”

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To Sivas, the money wasn’t the point. “Our focus was, ‘How can we negotiate to get bad stuff off the market?’” she says. The settlements Sivas’s organization received under the law were donated to children’s health organizations.

“But even then,” Sivas says, “there were attorneys popping up who were beginning to be perceived as shakedown artists.”

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“Where the drinking water is a problem is in rural areas,” Sivas says, as people often rely on wells that don’t face the same regulations as urban and suburban taps. Nearly 1 million Californians, many of them farmers in communities of color, lack access to clean water.

“The question Prop 65 poses is, ‘Who do you go after?’” says Sivas. But these contaminations are more systemic — driven by fractional infrastructure spending in rural communities and the encroachment of nitrates found in chemical fertilizers — and lack an easy company to prosecute. “No one has really harnessed Prop 65 to impact that.”