AMERICAN CULTURE IS made up of ideas and institutions that are passed down and accepted from one generation to the next, making up our distinctive way of life. When you think of a nation’s culture, you might consider its laws, language, art, moral ideals, and its historical achievements in fields from education to science and industry.
But law is uniquely influential in shaping culture because it establishes rules that are backed by force: Rebel against prevailing artistic, scientific, or religious norms and you might be out of step with the mainstream—but rebel against the law and you might lose your liberty, your property, or your livelihood.
Public interest law has the power to shape culture by shaping the direction of the law. At its best, public interest law—like the kind PLF practices—impacts our way of life by getting courts to reaffirm one of America’s core cultural, and constitutional, values: respect for individual rights.
The press and the public pay attention to legal controversies, especially when they reach the Supreme Court.
Individuals often face bad treatment by the government alone and suffer it quietly. But the press and the public pay attention to legal controversies, especially when they reach the Supreme Court. By making major causes out of individual cases, public interest law brings national attention to hidden injustices and circumstances in which our government has violated people’s individual rights and failed to live up to our moral and political ideals.
For example, take the case of Rose Mary Knick. For the past 35 years, mind-numbingly complex procedural rules made it nearly impossible for someone whose property rights were taken by local governments to sue for compensation in federal court. Those rules were overturned last year when PLF aided Knick in defending her rural Pennsylvania farm. The case made it all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court, spurring the national legal community, the press, and academia to talk again about the importance of property rights. The ensuing debates provide PLF and its allies a crucial opportunity to influence the wider cultural climate for property rights in America. This is part of what it means to impact the culture through public interest law.
Similarly, many people ignore constitutional limits on government when it comes to sympathetically titled laws like the “Clean Water Act”—after all, who would oppose clean water? But administrative agencies often abuse their authority under the law to threaten innocent people with ruinous fines and even jail time for innocuous activities.
For instance, PLF client Andy Johnson was threatened with financial disaster for digging a harmless “stock pond” to water his animals in rural Wyoming. The Sackett family, also PLF clients, had their lives upended by the Environmental Protection Agency for trying to develop a single-family home on a residentially zoned lot in Idaho (the agency said, erroneously, that it was in a federally regulated wetland). And even though PLF client Jack La Pant obtained all the proper authorizations for his Northern California farm, he now faces seven-figure fines simply for planting wheat on it.
These circumstances are shocking and increasingly frequent. But our public interest cases have exposed these and other abuses, elevating them to the Supreme Court and to the front pages of The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, and The New York Times. Without PLF and the power of public interest law to hold officials to account for their wrongs, our culture might be more infected by cynicism and resignation to the idea that American values for liberty and property rights are dying. For that reason, I am convinced that public interest litigation has an indispensable role in shaping American culture for the better.
Minority students attending failing neighborhood schools are perennially promised progress, but too often they become victims of misguided political movements. LaShawn Robinson’s son was denied a seat at a world-class magnet school because an outdated racial quota law in Connecticut prevented too many black and Hispanic students from attending the school. But LaShawn and other black and Hispanic families stood up to this blatant discrimination. PLF represented minority families challenging this unjust and unconstitutional law. And despite the racial quotas limiting opportunities of hundreds of minority students in Connecticut, the NAACP and the ACLU were fighting LaShawn and the other families and trying to keep the racial quotas in place. The case earned national attention and because of the Connecticut families’ bravery, Connecticut changed the law to get rid of the racial quota and open up more empty seats to deserving students, regardless of their skin color.
Andy Johnson is a Wyoming farmer who tried to build a stock pond on his property to water his livestock and improve the environment around his farm. But the Environmental Protection Agency tried claiming that Andy was violating the Clean Water Act and threatened him with a $37,500 fine every day unless he ripped it out. PLF represented Andy and helped him stand up to the EPA in court and bring national attention to the absurd bullying tactics of the EPA. Last fall, the Trump administration issued two executive orders designed to make regulatory agencies more accountable and transparent, and end the kind of abuse Andy experienced. In a press conference with the President as he signed the executive order, Andy thanked PLF and provided amazing proof of the power of public interest law.
Homeowners like Uri Rafaeli, Erika Perez and her father Romualdo, and Myron Stahl all had their homes seized by local governments to pay small property tax debts. But because of an unjust Michigan law (that also exists in 13 states across the country), the counties were allowed to sell the homes and keep all the remaining value—which many times was tens of thousands of dollars more than what the homeowners owed in back taxes. Because these homeowners were willing to fight back, home equity theft is being exposed, debated, and stopped. The Michigan Supreme Court is considering an end to the practice, and legislation was passed in Montana and is currently under consideration in Arizona. PLF is bringing the fight to other states to end this practice nationwide.
