To a High Court: Five Bold Law Students Challenge Corporate Greed and Change the Law

by Neil Thomas Proto

Overview

Fall 1971. Richard Nixon is in the White House. Five George Washington University law students form Students Challenging Regulatory Agency Procedures (SCRAP). SCRAP's intent: to challenge the corporate greed of the nation's railroads and the failure of the government to protect the environment, especially through compliance with the newly enacted National Environmental Policy Act. Author Neil Thomas Proto, then SCRAP's chair, draws from contemporaneous notes and transcripts and builds a narrative with photographs and actual dialogue to take you through eight months of battle against the government, powerful law firms, the nation's railroads, and national environmental organizations-all while SCRAP's members are studying law, only blocks from the disquiet in the White House and amid the threat and reality of anti-war demonstrations. Having enough of the deceit and the empty commitments of change, in spring 1972, SCRAP sues the United States. As success emerges, SCRAP's adversaries stymied, the critical legal question remains: Does SCRAP have "standing to sue-the right to be in court at all? That question reaches the Supreme Court of the United States.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781039180482
Publisher:	FriesenPress
Publication date:	04/14/2023
Pages:	348
Sales rank:	476,538
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.72(d)

About the Author

Neil Thomas Proto is a lawyer who has also taught at Yale University and Georgetown University's McCourt School of Public Policy. His books include Fearless: A. Bartlett Giamatti and the Battle for Fairness in America and The Rights of My People: Liliuokalani's Enduring Battle with the United States 1893-1917. He lives in Washington, DC.

Editorial Reviews

★ 2023-06-12
Proto’s nonfiction account follows law students crusading for a monumental legal victory.

The author looks back to 1971, when he was at George Washington University spearheading Students Challenging Regulatory Agency Procedures, a group fighting the environmental destruction caused by major railroads by pursuing their liability under President Richard Nixon’s new National Environmental Policy Act. Proto led a group of five GWU law students in a legal battle that gradually expanded to pit them against the United States government and bring the case all the way to the Supreme Court. The author draws on copious legal case law history and all kinds of contemporaneous notes and memoranda to present the progression of the case with novelistic flair and pacing. “The ICC was not familiar to any of us,” reads one such passage. “We knew it regulated railroads, pipelines and motor carriers. We acquired the knowledge we needed in four ways: reading history, reading cases, reading Nader, and sharing personal experiences.” Proto fills the text with photos of all of the places and people in his story. He makes the wise decision throughout his narrative to refrain from hyperbole, and this restrained approach very effectively underscores the skill and even the heroism of his central cast of characters (“Our imperative from the fall of 1971 was to discern corporate wrongdoing that harmed the public and to examine the failure of government in its public duty—as prescribed by laws enacted by Congress—to confront and correct it”). Despite his long personal history as a lawyer and writer on legal matters, the author entirely avoids the tedious procedural minutiae that often hamper works of legal nonfiction like this one. The personalities he draws are sharp and ready-made for a Hollywood adaptation, and his insider’s look at how the Supreme Court works is fascinating in its own right, at once enormously informative and genuinely entertaining.

An enjoyably readable and fascinating day-by-day account of a landmark Supreme Court case.

Kirkus Reviews