5
COMMUNITY AND CONSCIOUSNESS
SHORTLY AFTER the district court decision in the pipeline case, I sat down to lunch with my friend Ralph Siu and turned the subject to the case. I was full of our success and outraged by the oil companies’ cavalier indifference to the environment. Ralph’s calm offset my enthusiasm.
“It’s important to plan your strategy with full regard for the long term,” he said. “Your action was especially significant because you averted an action that could have had disastrous impact for generations. On the other hand, our country has an insatiable appetite for oil. Over time, that demand is going to drive resource decisions, and real progress will have to address that problem. The corporations will do what is necessary to meet that demand. I doubt if the corporate decision makers are bad people.”
I realized that I had fallen into the habit of thinking they were bad people, the enemy. CLASP tended to run on polarized and adversarial thinking, and oil company executives had a high ranking on the list of villains.
I had met Ralph on the board of trustees of the Academy for Contemporary Problems, a nonprofit think tank in Ohio. A small, round-faced Chinese-American in his mid-fifties, he wore a shapeless 108gray suit, a narrow dark tie, and a white shirt. The most striking thing about his appearance was the broad smile that almost never left his face. He had been chosen by Attorney General Ramsey Clark to become the first director of the National Institute of Law Enforcement and Criminal Justice, although his background was as a research chemist and science administrator.1 At the board meetings in Ohio, he had a wealth of funny stories that he told— to my considerable annoyance—whenever discussions became heated and disagreements came to the surface. I often felt that he was defusing significant disagreements that would be better left to a more pointed debate and resolution by a vote. His self-effacing, nonconfrontational style was simply not a way of being in the world that I knew anything about. It’s as if law schools screen out people like this. I didn’t know what to make of Ralph and I regret to admit that I took him to be a lightweight, a little silly in fact, at our first meeting.
I wanted to talk manifesto; he wanted to talk gentle exploration. I wanted to sharpen the edges; he wanted to round them and find points of intersecting interests. He did not seem rigorous or forceful in the manner that I had come to expect of brilliant and effective people. Always cheerful and relaxed, he listened with deep concentration to what other people said and seemed to have no overpowering ideological commitments. Still, I was intrigued by his interest in integrating Eastern and Western ideas, and I enjoyed his company.
When we were both in Washington I would call him for lunch, and a pattern soon emerged. He would respond with great enthusiasm, inviting me to choose a date to come as his guest to the Cosmos Club.
I would often arrive a few minutes late, rushing and out of breath. Relaxed in a large leather armchair in the lobby, he would greet me with a radiant smile.
109“I hope you haven’t been waiting long. How are you?”
“Couldn’t be better,” he would say.
We would walk through the club’s winding corridors to the dining room, past the wall of photographs of members who had received the Nobel Prize. We would sit down at our table, and he would write down my order, as members often do at clubs like the Cosmos, a nice gesture of hospitality. “Hmm. That sounds good, I think I’ll have the same,” he would say, and write a “2” next to each item. We would talk for hours. He was intrigued by what I was doing and asked questions of a kind that I had never thought about and that no one else had ever asked.
As we sat waiting for our food, I thought about my last visit to the club. I said, “Coming in here today reminded me of a meeting I had with David Brower. This same doorman tried to send us to the side door, because one of our students was a woman. She brushed him aside, and we all came in the front entrance.”
A faint look of discomfort crossed his face. “Yes, it’s a ridiculous rule, isn’t it? But there are a few old members who joined the club during the Hoover administration, and they still cling to a Victorian system of propriety. In a few years they will be gone, and the club will be able to update its policies.”
“And until then women will be sent around the side door?” “Well,” he said, “you have to choose which fights you want to take on. Which things are likely to change on their own in due course. And which changes can be moved along with a gentle nudge. Sometimes it is a question of timing. Think about opening the lens and looking at the widest possible picture. You can often get insights that are lost in a too-close attention to the problem of the moment.”
110I sat back to listen. These were novel ideas. I was troubled by what seemed like his excessive patience.
“There is a natural rhythm in things,” he said, “and your work will be more effective if you bring your efforts into harmony with those natural rhythms.”
I pressed him on this point. “How do you describe these rhythms? How can I be sure that I haven’t just imagined them?”
“The rhythms are subtle and not easy to describe. They’re more likely to be recognized by intuition than by analysis. You’re more likely to recognize them if you are in silence and in repose, if your mind isn’t busy and distracted. But that doesn’t make them less real or worthy of attention.”
His answer was interesting, but frustratingly unspecific, and difficult to implement in my busy public interest practice.
“When you approach a difficult problem, try to make your mind like the surface of a still pond—reflecting the world just as it is, without distortion, without highlighting any particular thing more than another, without flattening out the complexities. Don’t let any political or ideological filters stand between you and the world. Make sure you see things clearly first, before you begin to think about the most skillful response.”
As I walked back to my office, I thought about my conversation with Ralph. His gentle comments had put our success into a different perspective, reminding me of the complexity and importance of the work we were undertaking. I lived comfortably in the suburbs with two cars. I hadn’t shifted my lifestyle significantly to use less oil or to conserve resources, and I knew only a few people who had. If the environmental cause was to succeed, it would eventually have to deal with these issues. And I would have to look at the way I lived.
Of course, most oil executives were not bad people. They lived in a milieu that rewarded them for ignoring the long-term consequences 111of what they did. The rules by which they played and their system of rewards would have to be changed, a task as formidable as reducing the profligate energy use by ordinary people—like me. The Alyeska victory was just a small step. My task, Ralph said, was to start, to choose carefully the right steps to take, and to move ahead forcefully, with full recognition that the final outcome was not in my control.
I found this insight difficult to follow in the overheated environment of a public interest law practice. I had, however, already learned to see some of the complex ways that CLASP interconnected with the establishment, through the foundations, our board, our professionalism. We were not in an “us-against-them” fight to the finish. Yet I sometimes spoke as if we were.
Ralph’s comments set in motion a process that subtly affected the way I approached problems. Visualizing my mind as the mirrorlike surface of a still pond made it more difficult to jump to facile conclusions based on preconceptions. But it was a hard assignment. I had made a big investment in my identity as an activist, a public interest lawyer, a progressive. It was not easy for me to address a new problem—like the Alaska pipeline problem as presented by Brower—without immediately translating it into a legal issue and a challenge and opportunity for our public interest law firm. But there was an obvious advantage to understanding the facts in themselves, in their largest context, before putting them through the processor of legal-analysis and letting my understanding be shaped by what I wanted to see or hoped to accomplish. As I thought about the next steps in following up on the Alyeska success, I would do well to look closely at the complex, interlocking problems of energy use and to think about various strategies that might permit us to attract unanticipated allies in a struggle that was likely to last for decades.
Months into our relationship, I realized that Ralph had become my teacher, really the first teacher I ever had whose curriculum was 112not substantive content in history or law, but rather how to live my life. I edged into the relationship tentatively—simply conversations with a friend at first. Gradually, I realized that his lifetime of study of Eastern thought in Western contexts was filling our conversation with content, and suggesting to me a new way of approaching my life.
His subtle and sensitive way of teaching forced me to learn new skills as a student. I had been trained by my father, reinforced at law school, to learn by constantly challenging ideas, probing the weak spots in an argument. With Ralph, I learned in a different way—by restraining my impulse to critique new ideas, by listening more hospitably, by holding his questions unanswered and letting them echo in my mind in the days that followed our conversations. This new way of learning, patient and slow to make judgments, became a cornerstone in my cultivation of wisdom.
At the same time we were handling significant public interest cases and I was pursuing my dialogues with Ralph, we were trying to build an activist learning community that reflected a new consciousness— breaking out of hierarchical relationships and exploring the possibility of a broader legal education that integrated the personal and the professional. We tried to expand our lawyerly identities by engaging with the members of our community as full people who share each other’s joys and sorrows. It was not easy, and the constraints generated by foundations, law schools, and my acculturated sense of appropriateness were considerable. Moreover, with each step away from the norms of law and higher education, I had to contend with my inner Woody Allen, the cynical, whiny voice in my mind constantly warning, “Don’t be such a schmuck. This period of openness and exploration will end, and you will be better off playing safe.”
113Doing socially important work and challenging institutional authority—the David-and-Goliath aspect—fed the community spirit and supported our experiments in new relationships and structures. We were living at a time when inherited norms were crumbling. Many of our students were just a few years younger than I was, but they seemed to be on the other side of a deep divide, a barrier shaped by the sexual revolution, widespread use of marijuana, and their exposure to the Vietnam draft. Marijuana had been a normal part of the students’ lives in college, and even in high school. They had grown up in the middle of the sexual revolution, part of the campus unrest that was shaking the universities. And they were eligible to be drafted to fight a war they hated.
Although my impulses in starting CLASP were primarily rationalist and lawyerly, I was also willing to experiment with consciousness, to try being less lawyerly, more open to new relationships and experiences. So I was receptive when our students brought their cultural innovations into CLASP, and I explored, somewhat randomly, the possibilities at the edges of my circumscribed, orderly life.
My horizons were expanded by my visits to California, at first undertaken with the earnest mission of persuading students at Stanford and UCLA law schools that they ought to entrust their legal education to CLASP (which had not yet opened its doors) and commit a full semester to clinical training in public interest law. While I was there, I also had time for a little exploration of the new California subculture. California was not just a place. It was the epicenter of a revolution, a new state of mind.
On one trip, I went down the Peninsula to Stanford Law School to interest students in CLASP and interview those who were interested. I was impressed that a dozen of them were prepared to take 114the gamble on this untried experiment, after they had so successfully climbed the slippery pole of academic achievement and reached this pinnacle, a jumping-off place to the prestige positions in the legal world.
That evening, I went to Fillmore West to hear the Jefferson Airplane. The only person in the hall wearing a tie, I was shaken by the face paint, the tie-dyed clothing, the stoned, grinning friendliness. “One pill makes you larger/One pill makes you small/And the ones that mother gives you don’t do anything at all.…” After a while, the light show and the loud throbbing music took me in and I lost myself in the sea of undulating bodies. We were supposed to hear the Grateful Dead too, but we left at 2 A.M., when they were just setting up. I had a plane to catch the next morning, and I still believed in getting some sleep before taking on the next day.
For the next several years I traveled to California to recruit students and to speak at conferences and meetings. The trips always combined CLASP business with forays into the new culture. I went to a Moroccan restaurant and ate honeyed lamb with my fingers while reclining on pillows stacked on the padded floor. I hiked the trails on Mount Tamalpais and in the redwood groves. I attended an elegant party for law professors where the guests were offered a choice of cocktails or joints neatly laid out on a silver tray. It wasn’t the deep California counterculture—no LSD, no trips to the baths at Esalen, no Merry Pranksters—but it was enough for me to realize that there really was something new going on. I found that my exposure to the California culture was loosening me up, creating a space where I could bring some lightness even to the heaviest subjects. I always carried a whiff of it back with me to my East Coast life.
Because I was at CLASP, I was continuously exposed to the new things that were engaging students. We invited them to enter into the Center’s life with their whole selves. This was not a summer job in a law firm where they had to accept the norms of the firm, put 115on their dress-for-success suits and the masks of earnest professionals. CLASP was still being invented, and issues of professional identity were a subject for dialogue and debate.
I might have missed all of this, identifying with an older generation, guided through life by the norms of the fifties—confused by the fierce attacks on established institutions, offended by the music, and reflexively opposed to the use of pot. I tried to find a way to learn from the counterculture, and to integrate the lessons with my Eisenhower-era skills and values in a way that would be useful in the new world that was emerging. CLASP was a place where I could work on that synthesis.
I found my own way outside of the mainstream, while continuing to hold on to connections in my old world. I tried to bridge the gap between generations, between the traditional and the radical, between those who defined success financially and those who were committed to a life of service. This meant that I had to develop a set of skills, some quite unfamiliar, that permitted me to stretch limits and open new directions—to listen carefully to people with whom I disagreed, to hold my own views less tightly, to present my ideas in a way that was open and inviting.
As I began to understand that being the executive director of the Center for Law and Social Policy was going to be a complex and demanding job, I decided to get some training in what it takes to head an organization. Although we were committed to a relatively flat hierarchical pyramid, I was the designated CEO, with administrative responsibilities and obligations to manage our relationships with the outside world. I had a long history of challenging authority but little experience in exercising it. I thought that there were probably unique problems, too, in heading an organization 116like CLASP that had questioning authority at the center of its mission. It attracted staff and students who were doubtful of authority and willing to stand up to it, and in those egalitarian days we were committed to eliminating illegitimate hierarchy.
There was nothing in my education or experience to prepare me for these complicated tasks. I had never taken a course on leadership or led anything larger than a canoe trip. Like a good lawyer, I was trained to meet new situations with a confident demeanor and the brusque assurance that I was in control. I decided to try a different tack, acknowledging that I needed help and going where I could get it.
At that time, a friend told me about a conference on leadership and authority relationships that he had just attended. It was held by an American offshoot of the Tavistock Institute, a celebrated London center that brought a psychoanalytic approach to the study of group process. My expectations were modest and pedestrian— how to be more effective in running a meeting, evaluating employees, working with a board of trustees—and I decided to sign up.
The Tavistock meeting began at Amherst College on a balmy summer day in 1970. I had been extremely busy at the office, and had made travel arrangements to get me to the five-day conference just a short time after it was scheduled to begin. I thought there would be a couple hours of orientation, settling in, and introduction.
The atmosphere was decidedly chilly in the registration room, and I was the only straggler in sight. My registration packet lay alone on what had been a crowded table. The registrar urged me to go at once to the seminar room where my small group had been meeting for forty-five minutes. The work had begun. Everyone else seemed to know that being on time was crucial.
I walked into a simple room with a view out on the rolling greens of the campus, the mature oak trees in full summer foliage. Inside 117the air-conditioned room, under the fluorescent fixtures, it was chilly and silent. The tables had been pushed to the side and fifteen chairs were arranged in a circle, with one chair vacant. No one greeted me when I came in and no one identified himself as the person in charge. I took my seat quietly, surprised that no one made eye contact. I waited for something to happen. The people around me were, seemingly, as uncomfortable as I was. We were all there to study relationships and authority. I assumed that one of the people around this circle was going to make a presentation and lead a discussion. No one did. My anxiety was growing. Was I being hazed because I had come a little late?
As a discussion slowly began to unfold, I felt that everyone in my group knew a lot more about this process than I did, and I tried to be inconspicuous, sometimes attempting to defuse the tension with a joke—but my jokes were received with icy silence. We struggled to make sense of our Kafkaesque assignment, not even knowing at first who the consultant in our group was. Generally, I am a confident student, so I found my level of anxiety acutely unpleasant, causing sweaty palms and constant attention to my watch.
The consultant finally identified himself and began to probe areas that we were avoiding. Did the comments of men receive more attention than women? Were black people less likely to speak than whites? Did the same people keep trying to exercise leadership? What made their efforts fail? Did the same people try to cut them down?
The program was radically more difficult than anything I imagined. The Tavistock method applied a high-stress, high-return learning strategy to the understanding of authority in groups. We would not study in the usual cognitive way. There were no lectures, no texts, no summary of principles. We were going to learn experi-entially, by being placed in a high-anxiety situation where we had to figure out what the authority structures were and how we fit into 118them. We were given no instructions—and no task other than to study relationships in authority.
We were not introduced to each other, and the other participants knew nothing about me except my name. We were on our own, and we had to use our best intellectual, emotional, and intuitive resources to figure out what was going on and how to make the most of this unusual educational situation.
My first few days were full of fears and self-doubt. What had I gotten myself into? I hardly spoke to anyone, and I ate many meals alone. As the days wore on, I found that I began to function more effectively in this peculiar environment. I discovered that I was learning as much about myself—my own attitudes, fears, and expectations—as I was about groups. My training as a lawyer was relevant, but I found that I needed a lot of additional skills—an ability to read complicated relationships, to manage my own anxiety, to follow my instincts in threatening situations, to learn through reflecting on my own actions.
Being stripped of my identity and credentials created additional challenges. I had grown accustomed to leaning on my position and profession, the degrees I had earned, and the people I knew. When those props were swept away, I had to establish my identity in moment-by-moment interactions. In assessing the others in the group, I was also deprived of my usual stereotyping responses to people based on their status and rank; I had to evaluate my responses to people’s race, gender, and age. Conventional, habituated responses were useless.
The experiential method demanded that I stretch my intellectual, emotional, and intuitive capacities. I learned the value of listening scrupulously to what people were saying, and what they were communicating without words, by posture, facial expression, and body language, things that were too subtle to name. I learned the value of keeping my mouth shut, and at other times, of acting even 119if it meant risking censure. Engaging the full range of my emotions and reflecting on them gave me a more profound learning experience than the purely cognitive, instructional lectures and seminars that had been the stuff of my education up to that point.
I didn’t carry back to CLASP any of the concrete leadership skills that I had expected to learn. Instead, I brought back an ability to tune in to the underlying emotional dynamics in a group, a recognition of the importance and the limits of rational analysis. I understood at a deep level that educating the whole person is essential. In the complex swirl of group processes where lawyers spend much of their working lives, from courtrooms to client conferences, cognitive skills are important, but a well-honed emotional intelligence is just as important. That was also true of CLASP, and I would have to have the humility to recognize that we were all learning together.
My Tavistock learning was especially relevant when the secretaries at CLASP came together to protest the hierarchy of the institution that kept women in support positions and concentrated decisional authority in the hands of male lawyers. As the women’s liberation movement was sweeping the country, CLASP obviously could not be untouched. We had started out with a legal staff of four white males. The support staff was made up of intelligent, conscientous women who chose to work at CLASP because they liked the ideology, the counterculture style, the promise of community. After my Tavistock experience, I knew enough to take their dissatisfaction seriously and to invite in a consultant to help us understand and respond to the problems.
A few of the secretaries who had been doing consciousness-raising and assertiveness workshops set the tone for the discussion.
120“You lawyers call yourselves ‘public interest lawyers,’” they said, “but we don’t see much evidence of a public interest commitment. What we see is elitism and the replication of the forms of oppression that you would find in any corporate, male-dominated law firm in the city. You promised us community, but what we get is typing and filing and a chance to applaud the lawyers’ successes. Why don’t you try practicing what you preach?”
The Tavistock experience prepared me for the vehemence of the attack, but I did not have enough distance to respond well. Couldn’t they see how much better we were than the corporate law firms? That accusation really hurt. They didn’t know what real hierarchy and disrespect looked like—as if doing it better than a corporate firm was a sufficient measure of performance. In fact, I could have headed off this confrontation if I had been more alert and sensitive. I was defensive and slow at first, but I embraced their suggestions and moved ahead with them.
Once their grievances had come out, we had to respond. After a period of debate, we agreed to include the secretaries more fully in decision-making processes and to acknowledge the importance of their contribution. We hired two women to come to CLASP to build a women’s rights agenda. With their leadership, we launched a Women’s Law Project, later to spin off as the National Women’s Law Center, which continues to exercise leadership in advocacy for women’s rights.2
An important result of the “Secretaries’ Revolt” for me was to understand more clearly that submerging myself in the role of lawyer was a mistake, that it limited my ability to see the problem clearly. I would have responded more effectively to the secretaries’ challenge if I had been less lawyerly, less adversarial and polarizing, more open and responsive in hearing the secretaries’ idealism, their hurt, and their desire to contribute to CLASP. I thought back to my conversation with Ralph Siu. He had advised me to confront any difficult or 121challenging problem without preconceptions, to try to see things just as they were and only then begin to frame a wise response.
At the same time this was going on at the office, I was dealing with the spread of feminist consciousness into my home. Susan had volunteered to work in the District of Columbia abortion counseling office of the National Women’s Liberation Front. It was work that Susan believed in deeply. She was moved by the plight of the women she counseled, and she was committed to the work. The program also ran weekly meetings for their counselors to deal with the stresses of the work and to raise their consciousness of the oppression of women in a male-dominated, patriarchal society. They shared stories from their own lives—their personal experiences with date rape and incest, legal and illegal abortions, relationships with insensitive and oppressive men, efforts to assert themselves in male-dominated work situations. “You wouldn’t believe what some of these women have been through,” she said. I wish I could say that I fully supported Susan’s participation in the consciousness-raising sessions. I didn’t. I felt that these sessions threatened to destabilize our quite traditional marriage. I was slow to recognize the merit of the feminist challenge and that we could not cling to old forms of marriage in rapidly changing times. I didn’t see the ways that I could embrace the changes. Instead, I responded like a lawyer—logical, argumentative, and fierce. I objected, “You go off on Wednesday evening and sit around with this group of women you hardly know and talk about the intimate details of our relationship. And they encourage you to sharpen your sense of grievance. None of them are in happy, fulfilling marriages, and they invite you to put our relationship under a microscope, looking for oppression and patriarchal cruelty.”
122She hung in. The abortion counseling was important to her, and she liked the independence. Gradually, more slowly than I should have, I came to understand the importance of her growing autonomy and her participation in the group. She was right. And the powerful currents flowing through the society could not be ignored or fought. The women’s movement became more familiar and less threatening. My most paranoid fears did not materialize. As I eased up, it became clear that Susan had no interest in pushing to the edges of feminist sensibility and action, and our marriage made an important transition to greater equality.
We were part of the de facto national experiment with the boundaries of the marriage relationship. Marriages were subject to an abnormal amount of stress in the seventies. We saw a great deal of divorce around us; other marriages persisted, but seemed to lose their resilience and joy. We came through this challenging time with a marriage that was full of love, vitality, and the capacity for growth. We had kept enough flexibility in the relationship to bend in strong emotional winds without snapping. Our commitment and love for each other gave us each sufficient space to participate in the exciting, energizing currents of the time without being torn from the roots that we had nourished together. I was able to get beyond a rigid clinging to male prerogatives and come to a vision of a marriage of sharing and equality, reinvention and renewal.
In order to build the sense of community in CLASP, I scheduled a retreat each semester for the new group of students to join the lawyers and secretaries for a weekend in West Virginia. We could get some distance from the stress of our law work, and build deeper connections. We took over the cabins of a summer camp two hours west of Washington, in the valley of the Cacapon River, which ran 123north to join the Potomac River west of Harper’s Ferry. The camp nestled at the foot of rock cliffs at a broad point in the Cacapon Valley. The river’s flow slowed at the camp’s swim area, then increased as it dropped over a rocky ledge to a stretch of rapids below. It was a beautiful place, whether in the brilliant colors of autumn or the fresh greens of spring. Twice a year we went there, played Frisbee in the meadows, canoed on the river, and told stories around the fire late into the night.
These retreats built an easy connection among us, enabling us to engage with each other as whole people, not simply as finely honed thinking machines. On our walks through the woods and across the green fields we were able to delve below our professional roles to explore our aspirations, our doubts, and our ambitions. We talked about the ways that a lawyer’s skills could be used to build a more just society, one more respectful of ecological realities, one more moved by compassion, and about the possibility of pursuing both a career of service and a family life. We touched a place behind the glib cynicism and lawyer humor that are cultivated in law schools and law firms.
Some of the students had never spent a night in the country. Together, we watched the moon rise as we sat around a campfire, listening for wolves howling in the hills. For many, over the course of a long weekend, their fears and doubts were replaced by joy in the silence and beauty of the place. On our long walks together, we slowed down to look at new spring leaves unfurling on bare branches and to listen to birdsong and the flow of the river. The peace and slowness gave us all some distance from our busy lives at CLASP and the urgently important cases on which we were working. From the perspective of this isolated valley in West Virginia, surrounded by deep woods and the drama of the turning seasons, the war in Vietnam and the depredations of the Nixon White House could be contemplated in a different way, more spaciously and with a larger time sense.
124I treasured these West Virginia retreats for another reason. The camp setting resonated deeply with me, taking me back to a formative time in my life—my teenage years, when I had spent summers at a camp in the forests of central Ontario. At thirteen years old, it was a bold choice to go to an island in the middle of a large lake. I had learned to swim late, and I was nervous around the water. Neither of my parents knew how to swim. My father lived in his head; he viewed his body as a carrying case for his mind.
Although I had never seen a canoe before, my competence grew over the course of the summer, and I learned to paddle in the distinctive style of the Algonquin Indians who had lived on these lakes. I walked the same portage trails that they had and found my way across the trackless lakes as they had.
Far from my life as an ambitious and successful student, I met Susan. We began our lifelong, evolving romance in these idyllic surroundings, paddling canoes across clear blue lakes, stopping at sandy beaches for noonday swims, cupping our hands and dipping them in the lake water to drink. As I sat in the stern of the canoe, I loved watching the muscles in her back ripple under her smooth, dark skin with each stroke of her paddle. Our relationship deepened in those quiet hours, feeling the gentle movement of canoes through still waters.
In those Canadian summers I learned modest skills—reading the clouds to anticipate rain, building a fire with wet wood, carrying a sixteen-foot canoe across swampy, poorly marked portages. As I sat in the stillness of a golden sunset, listening to a loon breaking the silence with its wild laugh, I had an early intimation of deep connections and wordless relationships.
At the time I thought of this as merely a vacation, less important than my “real” life as a student. But, as I looked back from the West 125Virginia hollows, I could see that this was the place where I first experienced inner stillness, and an emerging awareness of my place in the natural order, before I had ever heard the word ecology. My memory of those shadowy insights in my teen years made our retreats in West Virginia especially meaningful to me, an opportunity to reconnect to the part of myself that had awakened in a canoe on the northern lakes.
In our exploration of the new cultural landscape around us, Susan and I began taking a yoga class. Our instructor, Dorji, was an earnest young man who dressed all in white. He had a quiet, focused manner and a strong presence. His gentle teaching had me twisting my body in unimaginable ways, my arms knotted behind my knees, and my fingertips clutching each other behind my back. On his instruction, I began paying close attention to my breath, the symbolic point of connection between our physical being and our spiritual essence. At the end of class we would lie silently in savasana, the corpse pose, deeply relaxed and close to sleep, but awake and alert. I felt remarkably good after class, as if I had had a thorough workout, but I was grounded and cheerful, not tired. Problems that had seemed insurmountable looked more manageable, and tensions loosened their hold.
Sitting over coffee with a group of students one morning, I speculated about what it would be like if yoga were integrated into the training of lawyers. “People wouldn’t live in their heads so much,” I said. “They would learn to return to their breath and take a few full breaths before flying off the handle, cursing opposing counsel, or firing their secretary. And the experience of professors, secretaries, and students doing it together could help break down the status and rank order that gets between people and gums up the works. Who knows? Flexibility of the body may lead to flexibility 126in the mind. I am surprised that one of the California law schools hasn’t tried it. I understand that just about everyone in California does yoga or something like it.”
One of the Stanford students said, “At Stanford, they try to be like Harvard without the neckties and tweed sport coats. If there is going to be yoga for law students, you’d better do it here. My roommate is a yoga instructor. I could invite her in for a class.”
The next week Giselle arrived in a mauve leotard to teach yoga. We moved aside the tables in the library, closed the shutters at noon, and spread towels on the floor. For the next hour the library was off limits for legal research. We were a motley group—beautiful young women who had been college gymnasts and middle-aged men who drank too much beer and could hardly bend from the waist and touch their knees. The beautiful Giselle, lithe and flexible as a bamboo wand, led us in asanas, breathing exercises and a deep relaxation that brought our minds to the edge of a spacious noncognitive awareness. “Don’t judge yourselves,” she said in a soft, smooth voice. “No comparisons with the person next to you. Just try to be friends with your own body, examine what it feels like to relax completely into a posture and let go of all tension.” When the class was over, we walked out of the room relaxed and open to whatever had come up. I went to my desk and leafed through the little stack of pink phone messages that had accumulated without my usual sense of dread and frustration. Work went a little better that afternoon, though the good effects had worn off by quitting time. I invited Giselle to come back weekly to carve out a little space of stillness and grace in the middle of our work. I never entered the library after that without my breath slowing down a little, sensing the musky smell of Giselle’s incense.
“Aren’t you afraid that CLASP will be dismissed as a bunch of flakes if word gets around the legal community about the yoga-in-the-library program?” one of our more cynical students asked.
127“Some people already see us that way,” I said. “I don’t think this would make much difference. The key is to keep doing good cases and educating students.” I believed that yoga helped with both— but I didn’t highlight it when I reported back to the law school deans. Yoga helped us build our community and gave the students something important as they moved into their profession. Even in our busiest times, we took the time to take care of ourselves, to acknowledge the connection of the mind and body, and we did it together, in mutual commitment to each other. I relied on my inner sense of rightness in introducing the yoga; I hadn’t fully worked out a justification and I wasn’t ready to defend it to skeptics. Looking back, I think that bringing yoga into the law library was an early effort to introduce the practice of wisdom into my life and my work. It created a moment of balance and ease in our busy, purposive days and helped us connect with each other at a different level than during our sharp debates about the meaning of federal statutes.
As Susan and I planned a trip to Europe with our three young children, Winfield Scott, a man we scarcely knew, insisted that we stay in his house embedded in a medieval Italian village near the French border. “Fanghetto doesn’t appear on any map,” he said, “but I can assure you that it is there. It has been standing there among the olive groves for a thousand years. It is a bit primitive, but since you are planning on camping with three little children, I don’t think it will be too primitive for you.”
Our visit to Fanghetto that summer opened a new way of seeing the world for me. It started with the drive to the village. As we traveled north across the broad Mediterranean coastal plain, the road seemed to end at an impenetrable wall of mountains. Once we were closer to the steep granite slopes, the road slipped into a crevice in 128the mountain wall, and began its twisting course along the steep gorge carved out by the Roya River as it plunged down through the Maritime Alps. And then there was the village itself, a complex labyrinth of rooms, terraces, passageways, and staircases, all made of stone, perched on a steep mountainside above the river.
When our eyes had adjusted to the dim light inside Win’s rooms, we saw that we were in an unfamiliar space. The walls of the rooms, made of white stucco, sloped into vaulted ceilings. There were no straight lines or right angles. No two steps were the same height, and each tread had been worn down in the middle by the passage of many feet. A non-Euclidian geometry governed. It was easy to imagine people living in these rooms for hundreds of years, harvesting the olives, watching the changing seasons. We found surprises at every turn in the streets, along every terrace in the olive groves, in every twist of the Roya River at the foot of the mountain. To swim in the river, we had to wind down through the olive terraces, across a bridge built by the Romans, and down across the rocks to the edge of the water. Nothing was predictable. Nothing corresponded to the world we knew at home.
One evening, Susan and I were sitting on our terrace in the evening glow, after the sun had dipped below the rocky ridge across the steep valley, sipping licorice-tasting Pernod and watching the swallows swooping through the air below us.
“This is a different world,” Susan said. “And I love it.”
I knew what she meant. We had grown up in Buffalo and Toronto, on the broad, flat plains near the Great Lakes, and we lived in Washington, where streets were laid out in grids. The geometry was clear, predictable, and simple. “We are flatlanders,” I said. “We are accustomed to long, flat vistas. Life follows the geometry. In Washington, the parallel streets are lettered alphabetically. No surprises, everything rational and orderly. Mountain people couldn’t possibly see the world that way.”
129“Too many cliffs, roaring rivers, contoured trails, unpredictable storms, porous borders, ecstatic vistas, and sudden catastrophes,” Susan said. “No possibility of grids. Nothing is predictable.”
After our visit to Fanghetto, we never were wholly flatlanders again. As we absorbed the perspective of the mountain people through our senses and in our bodies, we came home with a new understanding of the world’s complexity, the long skein of human experience, and the joys of living without right angles shaping our consciousness.
Mountain people constantly experience the limits of what we can know and control with our minds. They would not expect the world to progress in a linear fashion. As a person with a newly acquired mountain perspective, I was impatient with the Euclidean geometry of the Washington streets and the classical analogue that dominated the legal system. We have returned to Fanghetto often, and our visits have been a catalyst, helping us overturn old expectations and move toward a more open, more exploratory, less predictable way of life.
After several years of retreats with the CLASP students, Susan and I bought a cabin in West Virginia, the Mountain State, downstream from the retreat site, on the east side of the river. The inconvenient fact that the road ran along the west side of the river and there was no bridge only added to its charm and lent an element of improvisation to our visits. Depending on the season, we could wade across, paddle our canoe, walk on the ice, or drive across. Our cabin reminded us of Fanghetto, where nothing was linear and reliable. We learned that the river could be powerful and unpredictable. It could be shallow enough to ford in our suburban station wagon on a warm summer weekend, but an upstream thunderstorm an hour later could 130turn it into an impassable inferno of dark brown water, running fifteen feet deep, carrying full-grown trees uprooted from the banks. Then, the next morning, we might be able to drive across again and head home. As we went up to the cabin on weekends with the children and their friends in all seasons, the river was a tangible, living teacher about impermanence and the constancy of change.
Shortly after we began going to West Virginia, we picked up a couple of secondhand canoes, well-scarred before they came to us, and began paddling in the still waters and small rapids near our cabin. But we wanted to do more—to paddle the wilder sections of the river where it ran through rocky canyons, down boulder-filled rapids, and over steep ledges. Although we felt confident in canoes, we didn’t know how to manage in a fast-moving river—to read the water, to locate hidden rocks, to ride the tricky currents where the river turned sharply at the foot of a cliff.
Susan and I signed up for lessons being offered by the Canoe Cruisers Association, a volunteer group of fanatical paddlers in Washington who were anxious to recruit and train new members. At our first lesson, we met with a group of other students on the edge of the C&O Canal, just beyond the Washington suburbs, and carried our canoe down a steep bank to the shore of the Potomac River, a mile below Great Falls, where the river runs swiftly, a half-mile across, around rocks and under low-hanging branches at the edges.
“Is this class for expert paddlers?” I asked, as I looked out at the river, deep and powerful, brown with runoff after the spring rains.
“Nope, for people who know the basic strokes,” said Bill, the instructor, who appeared to be a teenager.
We tightened our life jackets and got ready to paddle out, fearful of being swept downriver into Chesapeake Bay.
“We’re going to head upstream first,” Bill said. “We’ll work our way up to the foot of Great Falls and then ride down real fast on the current.”
131It sounded impossible and reckless. The water was still cold from snowmelt in the mountains. We thought about our small children. Perhaps we should haul our canoe up the hill and come back with wetsuits and a more mature instructor.
Bill gathered us around him for brief instructions before launching. “The main thing is to relax. Don’t tighten up. Read the water carefully. At first, it looks like a giant, uniform flow, rushing downhill, with all the energy of Great Falls behind it. But look carefully.” He pointed upstream, close to the shore. “There’s a back current actually flowing upstream. You can ride that current for a couple hundred yards, then ferry across the main current to the eddy behind that rock. There’s quiet water there. You can sit and plan your next move. When you come out of the eddy, keep the bow pointed into the current and you can actually make some progress upstream, moving from eddy to eddy. And don’t push the river. It will flow by itself. Relax and pay attention.”
Susan and I knelt in our canoe and pulled out into a sheltered pool in the river. Already we could see a complex dance of flows and currents in what had seemed to be an undifferentiated, overpowering flow of water. We found the currents that we could ride upstream, sat in still eddies and ferried across the main currents. With total concentration, we worked our way upstream to the bottom of the Great Falls, stopping the upstream movement before we entered into the foam, turbulence, and chaos at the foot of the falls.
“And now we go with the flow,” Susan said, as we turned the canoe into the powerful downstream current for the quick and exhilarating ride back to our launch place, finding the channels between the rocks, avoiding the places where shallow currents flowed over submerged boulders.
We rejoiced in our new way to engage with fast-flowing rivers— without forcing, without trying to overpower the river, playing the 132shifts in current, carefully timing our movements. It would have been easy enough to tip the canoe if we had tensed up.
Canoes and small boats remain an important part of our lives. We paddled down the big rapids at Harper’s Ferry, where the Potomac and Shenandoah Rivers merge and break through the last ridge of the Blue Ridge Mountains. Our skills at riding the currents served us well in kayaking in southern Alaska, the Yucatan, Crete, and the Sea of Cortez.
These experiences have provided a support for my work as a lawyer and social entrepreneur. When I am in a stressful situation, I can visualize myself in a canoe in fast water and reconnect with the physical sensation of riding the currents—giving clear, relaxed, and mindful attention to the needs of the moment. I can reconnect with my capacity to choose a course of skillful action in turbulent times.
When I was in my late thirties, the father of three children, I realized that I had never been alone for even twenty-four hours. In part because we married so young and were immediately engaged with child rearing, and in part because I inherited my father’s gregarious personality, I had never taken a full day to myself. I decided to go up to our cabin in West Virginia on a cold wintry weekend and simply be alone, with nothing that I had to do. I had some misgivings about the project. I had so little experience of being alone that I did not know whether to expect a nurturing solitude or a frightening loneliness and isolation.
My weekend in the country was also undertaken in response to what I thought of as my shallowness crisis. The crisis grew out of a conversation I had with an old friend. Delighted by our chance meeting and feeling good about my life at that point, I said to her, “Probably, good things happen to good people.”
133“Oh, do you think so?” she said. “I think the story is more confused than that. The winds can blow from different directions. Four years ago, my husband and I were going out to dinner. He dropped me off at the restaurant, and went to park the car. He was crossing the street to the restaurant when he was hit and killed by a truck.”
“Sorry,” I said, trying to think of ways to back off from my incredibly shallow remark and express my sympathy.
“It was a long time ago, and I am doing all right. You don’t have to worry.”
She and I became friends again, and I raised the shallowness question with her when I met her next. At first, she was reassuring, then she added: “But, you know, you haven’t suffered very much. Not many scars. And I’m not sure what you have put in place to hold you steady when strong winds blow. How deep are your roots? Trees with shallow roots get blown over in a hurricane.”
She didn’t mean to be unkind; in fact, she seemed concerned about me.
I took her words and the issue of shallowness with me to West Virginia. I felt that I was fortunate to have the shallowness crisis arise when I was doing work that I believed in, that gave meaning to my life. At least I didn’t have to look at a career of defending lawn mower companies through the shallowness lens. Though my friends in the public interest law world were brilliant and dedicated, I didn’t have the sense that they would do any better than I would in dealing with the shallowness problem. Being brilliant and dedicated is consistent with being shallow. Come to think of it, there was little in my upbringing or education about cultivating depth, building up the inner resources that would help me respond wisely to the really hard times—death, illness, profound self-doubt.
When I arrived at the Cacapon River, I found deep snow on the banks and the river frozen all the way across. The ice and the water were clear as glass, so that I could walk on the ice and look down below my feet at fish swimming, stones glistening on the bottom of the river in the sunlight, and twigs and leaves flowing with the current underneath the ice. I had never seen a sight like this, and it left me speechless. Gingerly at first, I walked across the clear, slick surface, enjoying an experience of a world that I had never imagined. I let myself into the wonder of yet another incarnation of the river I thought I knew so well, had seen so often from my canoe, whose warm water supported me during lazy summer swims. This was a new and different entity.
It heightened my sense of the possibility of unanticipated transformation, and made me think that some new insight into the shallowness problem might emerge from this weekend of solitude. I imagined that I might see the problem with a clearer vision, just as I was seeing the life of the river with an unimaginable clarity. I walked up the hillside through the virgin snow with the cold, dry air crackling, up to the cabin.
I lit the kerosene stove, and soon the cabin temperature was up to a tolerable fifty-five degrees, where it remained during my stay. I split wood, built a fire, drew water from the pump, cooked simple meals. The place was utterly silent with a special winter silence— no insects, no birdsong, no sounds from neighbors.
After a cozy night’s sleep under a mound of blankets, I took a walk upriver through the woods to Loman’s Branch, a little stream that flowed into the river. It was familiar terrain, but it looked different under heavy snow, and the silence made me aware of details that I would miss when I was with Susan, chattering and laughing. I settled into the solitude and became conscious of the quality of attention that I gave to the intimate details of the landscape—the faint tracks that small birds left in the snow, the crack of boughs giving 135way under the weight of the snow. I was simply moving through the woods with a bright, wordless awareness, without thoughts.
As I approached the banks of Loman’s Branch, I heard an unearthly sound—like high bells ringing, softly and steadily, their sound merging and the notes harmonizing and shifting. I had never heard such a sound, doubly moving because it rang out against the silence of the winter landscape. I looked around for the source but didn’t even know what to look for. As I came down to the edge of the creek, I noticed balls of ice suspended over the surface of the frozen water, hanging from branches low over the stream, vibrating as the branches shook in the light wind. This ethereal symphony was the voice of hundreds of glowing ice balls vibrating in the noonday sunlight.
I sat down in the snow, an audience of one, and gave my full attention to this remarkable concert. When my feet became uncomfortably cold and I began the long slog back to the cabin, a thought arose in my mind about the shallowness problem. I had a sense, a conviction actually, that there was a vital connection between the experience of silent solitude and the development of resources to handle misfortunes in my life. I had an intuition that I would be able to handle them as they arose, and that the experience of solitude would help me to do so. I stood still in the twilight, halfway across our neighbor’s frozen pond, savoring this insight, as a light snow began to fall.
As I sat before the fire that icy winter evening, I felt a powerful connection to this valley and an enormous joy beside the frozen river. When I was quiet enough, I could feel it with my whole body. I hadn’t figured out how to bring that part of myself into environmental advocacy. In fact, the legal discourse pushed it farther away, helped fence off my feelings for the natural world from the issues that we 136were framing for decision. The overlay of legal analysis left out the poetry and romance of wild places, the subtle and powerful relationship of nature to my health and well-being.
For me, personally, the Alaska pipeline case always involved a web of abstractions. At the time, I had never been to Alaska nor had I seen the Brooks Range or the Arctic Ocean. I approached the pipeline as a lawyer’s task, with rules to be understood and applied, facts to be marshaled, logical arguments made, a specific result to be obtained. It was a creative piece of work, but it left me feeling incomplete.
I thought about the transparent river, flowing under the crystalline ice, which had given me so clear a view of the life of the river—the weeds bobbing in the currents, the fish swimming indolently upstream, the air bubbles sliding downstream, pressed against the ice. All of this was invisible when the surface of the water was ruffled by gusts of wind. I wanted to cultivate that clarity of vision, and to bring that sense of wonder to my work and to my life. I wanted to be able to touch back continually into such deep engagement with things as they are, and build my understanding and actions on that foundation, without distortion or distracting abstractions.
I began to understand that this clarity and connection flowed from stillness and silence, especially in natural surroundings. Later, I came to realize that such opportunities for reflection and introspection were essential to the cultivation of wisdom.
As CLASP’s reputation grew, the circle of friends that had launched it began to disperse, with many of its lawyers leaving to spread the public interest law concept. Jim Moorman left to launch the Sierra Club Legal Defense Fund (subsequently renamed Earth- 137justice), later returning to Washington to head the Lands Division of the Justice Department. Geoff Cowan went to California to teach and practice public interest law, later becoming Director of the Voice of America, then Dean of the Annenberg School of Communications at the University of Southern California. Bruce Terris began his own environmental law firm, handling precedent-setting cases in the federal courts.
Former CLASP students moved into leadership positions in communications law, environmental advocacy, consumer protection, and public health. CLASP has had a succession of dedicated and creative leaders, gradually shifting its work into the area of poverty law and continuing to exercise strong leadership in the public interest advocacy community.3
I left CLASP in 1974 to establish the Council for Public Interest Law (a joint venture of the American Bar Association and three foundations). As the Council’s executive director, I mobilized a coalition of public interest law firms, foundations, and leaders of the organized bar to assure the survival of public interest law and its continued expansion. We published a book-length report, Balancing the Scales of Justice, which analyzed the contributions of public interest law and proposed ways to foster its continuation and growth. Our recommendations were greeted respectfully—and widely disregarded.
In particular, we had recommended that courts award attorney’s fees to public interest litigants who succeeded on the merits of their cases. We were encouraged by the court of appeals decision in the Alaska pipeline case in which we had been awarded a substantial fee, a decision that seemed to hold out the promise of a major funding source for public interest advocacy. But the Supreme Court reversed the decision in 1975 by a vote of five to two (with two justices not participating), limiting the authority of the courts to award fees in such cases, and eliminating the possibility that self- 138sustaining public interest law practice would become a viable alternative on a wide scale.4
After spending a year as a visiting professor at Stanford Law School, in 1978 I joined the Georgetown Law School faculty, combining traditional academic life with public interest practice as the director of its in-house public interest law firm, the Institute for Public Representation, which had been launched by Vic Kramer after he left CLASP.5
My Georgetown experience was influenced by what I learned in a two-week seminar held in the Colorado Rockies at Devil’s Thumb in 1979. It was a program to introduce law professors to the insights of humanistic psychology in order to deepen their approach to law teaching and to make them more effective and self-aware law teachers.
After we had been meeting for a few days and felt that we had moved a good distance—becoming more open, more trusting, more connected to each other—Janet Lederman, a senior teacher from the Esalen Institute, arrived. Judging from her expression as she passed among us, Lederman seemed to think that we were just a bunch of uptight law professors. The first exercise she gave us is hard for me to even describe, much less imagine that I actually did it.
She brought us together in our main meeting room, assigned us a partner, and had each of us put on a blindfold. My partner was a small, rather proper woman who taught commercial law at George Washington Law School. When we were blindfolded, Lederman had each pair begin to discuss our strengths and weaknesses as law teachers. After ten minutes, she had us continue the conversations, still blindfolded, without using words. We did this at first, awkwardly and with embarrassment, through physical touch. “Try to 139understand each other,” she said. “Get a feel for who your partner is, deeper than words.”
Then she split up the pairs of partners and had us go to opposite sides of the rather large room, still blindfolded. “Now,” she said, “I want you to find your partner using sounds but not words.” I thought this was impossible, outrageous. We’d be here forever, doing this asinine and humiliating exercise. But I was willing to give it a try, and I started to make a quiet, tentative barking sound.
There was, of course, a cacophony of law professors making strange noises. My first reaction was that this sounded quite a lot like faculty meetings I had participated in. Then I started to sort out among the sounds a number of clear and recognizable voices. But my partner had a smaller, unfamiliar voice, so it took us a long time. We began a slow minuet, moving cautiously to avoid trampling each other. After about three minutes, people started to laugh hysterically as they found their partners, and within a couple of minutes we had all made the connection.
We sat in a circle, blindfolds off, to discuss our experience and what we drew from it. Naturally, I wasn’t the only person who had felt insulted and humiliated by the exercise. All of us expressed our own surprise at the fact that we had actually done it. The angriest among us, an African American professor from the University of Pittsburgh, said, “Yes, I did this exercise and found my partner, but what the hell does this have to do with being a law professor?” There was a moment of silence. It was clear that Lederman wasn’t going to say anything to explain what this was all about.
Joe, who taught civil procedure at the University of Iowa, said, “I can’t say how this is going to affect my law teaching, but I’ll tell you, it’s changed me in some way. I did something that I thought was impossible, I did something that I thought was demeaning, I did something that leaves me with a slightly embarrassed feeling about having done it at all. But I contacted some parts of my brain 140and some skill at focusing my attention that I had no idea that I had. I’m going to listen differently in the classroom, more attentive to the music behind the words, and more sensitive to the nonverbal ways that I can make a connection to each student.”
I resolved to draw on the techniques and insights from Devil’s Thumb in teaching the course in Legal Ethics in order to introduce the students to the emotional component of the lawyer’s complex ethical choices. Of course, it was easier to do this kind of activity in the high Rockies, below the towering peaks of the Continental Divide; and harder to do it in a sealed, air-conditioned room, under fluorescent lights, with seventy-five students sitting at tables bolted to the floor. But I tuned down the exercises to accommodate the different conditions.
I led a guided visualization exercise, calling on the students to shut their eyes and visualize themselves in a conference with an important client who asks them to forge a piece of evidence. I asked them to get in touch with their feelings when they hear this request, and with any sensation that they experienced in their bodies. Then I asked them to break into pairs to reflect on and discuss this experience. I emphasized that I wanted them to focus on their emotional feelings and physical experience, not analyze the legal and ethical issues in their client’s request. After a few minutes, we opened a general discussion in the whole class. I was struck by the intensity of the responses some of the students gave—some felt outrage, some assumed that that this sort of thing was routine in law practice, some felt a physical constriction in their abdomen. One student said that she had never been asked about her feelings since she had entered law school. Then we discussed several possible responses to the client; I thought that the exercise had gone pretty well.
141A few days later, I was called to the dean’s office. Three of my students had gone to the dean to complain that I was not adequately preparing them for the bar exam. “I know that you are covering the black letter rules, too,” he said, “but I think you might go easy on the guided visualizations.” At first, I didn’t quite know how to register this. Was this an official rebuke? Would a note of the students’ complaint go into my file?
It seemed that Georgetown was not going to be a comfortable setting for my experiments in innovative legal education.
CLASP lawsuits had helped usher in an era when environmental activists and other citizen groups became a more important factor in governmental decisions. The concept of public interest advocacy was well established and a substantial literature was developing, analyzing its impact. It was even spreading to other countries. Some public interest firms, like the Natural Resources Defense Council and the Environmental Defense Fund, were beginning to morph into large membership organizations with a formidable expertise that enhanced their legal skill with scientific know-how and media savvy. Ralph Nader developed his own network of public interest law firms and helped secure passage of critical legislation to protect consumers, the environment, and workers.
But the public interest law successes were becoming fewer and less dramatic. And the victories could be frustratingly transitory. In the environmental field, our victories could be overwhelmed by the pressure of politically powerful corporations. In the Alaska pipeline case, for example, after our success in court, the Interior Department was overseeing the emergence of a more responsible plan, a pipeline that was not a short-fused environmental time bomb.
142But the energy crisis of the early seventies gave the oil companies the opportunity to end-run the Interior Department process while the hearings before it were still under way. Using their political muscle, they sought passage of a special law that would permit the construction of the pipeline without further consideration of environmental issues and would waive the limitations on the width of their right-of-way. There was a stiff debate in the Senate. Oil company lobbyists applied maximum muscle to pass a provision to protect the legislation from judicial review. In the end the Senate was evenly split on this provision. It took the vote of Vice President Spiro Agnew—soon to resign in disgrace—to break the deadlock.6
The pipeline project went forward. It was a different and better pipeline for our efforts—better designed, more earthquake-resistant, and more respectful of the environment—but by no means foolproof, as the Exxon Valdez disaster in March 1989 was to demonstrate.
The early success of the public interest lawyers also helped generate a fierce and effective backlash. The conservatives’ initial response to the public interest law firms’ successes was to copy the form and establish their own network of “public interest law firms” devoted to the defense of corporate interests. They supplemented their law firms by creating conservative think tanks and setting out to make the federal courts less hospitable to government regulation and public interest litigation.
The Reagan revolution threatened to make the Washington environment toxic for the public interest law enterprise, closing the opportunities for public participation in government decisions that had opened in the preceding decade. The Reagan cult of individual accumulation made idealism suspect and cast doubt on the possibility of disinterested commitment to public service.