ON CHRISTMAS EVE I lost a friend, PLF lost a star attorney, and the nation lost a great advocate for freedom. With the passing of Reed Hopper, we have much to mourn but at the same time much to celebrate in having been blessed to share Reed’s passion for the law and liberty. But even more than that, Reed had an unerring sense of right and wrong, and the innate ability to choose the higher path in everything he did.
Reed’s commitment to doing the right thing was nurtured when he was young, growing up in a family life marked by dysfunction, foster care, and all those things that can drag down individuals not made of sterner stuff. Looking around, he told himself, “There has to be a better way.” Fortunately for all of us, he found that better way.
Dedicated to serving his church, family, and ideals, Reed was a great example of a man who lived out his values in all that he did. After graduating from the University of California, Davis, Reed began his journey of service by joining the Coast Guard, where he worked as an environmental protection officer and a hearing officer. That was followed by work in Sacramento on environmental compliance issues at the Aerojet rocket company by day, while attending McGeorge School of Law at night. He did all that while raising his family with his wife, Cathy, whom he met in college.
I had been an attorney for only a few years when Reed came to Pacific Legal Foundation in 1987. We all recognized immediately what we had in Reed: an individual whose hard work, native intelligence, and strong beliefs would carry him far. Reed was committed both to protecting the environment and those people who were adversely and unreasonably affected by government overreach. As he developed his expertise in environmental law, he was motivated by helping those ordinary Americans whose lives were often upended by bureaucratic injustice. Reed was especially talented in cutting through layers of legal obfuscation to get to the heart of an issue and figure out how to deal with it.
When global warming first became an issue in the early 1990s, he recognized immediately how an overreaching regulatory response could adversely affect people in all parts of the nation. He understood how the protection of endangered species without protections for ranchers and farmers who earned their living from the land could lead to misery for both the species and people. And he most famously identified and explained how the government’s wetlands regulations violated the law.
After years of laying the groundwork, he achieved his first Supreme Court victory in 2006 in Rapanos v. United States, a case where the Court rejected the government’s expansive attempt to regulate land well beyond the legitimate reach of the federal Clean Water Act. In 2016, he achieved his second victory in U.S. Army Corps of Engineers v. Hawkes Co., a unanimous decision that vindicated the right of landowners to have their day in court when the government deems their property to be regulated wetlands. And as he passed, he was waiting on the Court to issue a decision on the right to appeal the Obama Administration’s infamous “Waters of the United States” regulations. In a fitting tribute to his years of dedication to the greater cause of liberty, this unanimous decision came just days later. His expertise and these victories propelled him to testify frequently before congressional committees on what was wrong with our laws and how to fix them.
But more than any of those victories and his great accomplishments, Reed was a consummate professional, always willing to help a colleague. His love for his family, church, and nation was boundless and showed in everything he did. At age 66, he wasn’t ready to retire, telling us that he had much yet to accomplish for us. We will miss him profoundly.