Power to the People or the Profession? The Public Interest in Public Interest Law

Abstract

JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org. This content downloaded from 130.Our society seems to be possessed of a sudden anal retentive compulsion to scrub clean our skies, our rivers, and our streets-perhaps because our souls have become ineradicably sullied with the stains of racism and poverty. Environmental crusaders might well pause and ponder the underlying concern expressed by the Chorus in T. S. Eliot's Murder in the Cathedral:Clean the air! clean the sky! wash the wind! take the stone from the stone, take the skin from the arm, take the muscle from the bone, and wash them. Wash the stone, wash the bone, wash the brain, wash the soul, wash them wash them!l In the current romance between public interest law devotees and pollution, there is danger of a major moral default by the legal profession. Mayor Hatcher correctly observed that the environment issue had done what Alabama's George Wallace had not been able to do-"distracted the attention of the nation from the pressing problems of the black and poor people of America."2 Given the current unresponsiveness of the political system to ethnic minorities, the allocation of public interest law resources to majoritarian, middle-class, white concerns is contrary to the public interest. The political system can respond to these concerns without siphoning off the limited, special and constitutionally distinctive resources of the legal profession.The constitutionally insulated role of legal advocacy carries a concomitant obligation to recognize that, while many causes may be legitimate, the allocation of scarce legal resources to a "public" cause * B.all the rhetoric, the concern with pollution appears to be nothing other than a way of securing subsidization for white suburban communities to cope with the waste disposal problems caused by their hasty and ill-executed flight from the cities. This is in keeping with the American way. We self-righteously subsidize highways and other middle-class needs, but insist on stigmatizing welfare as a dole. 1005 This content downloaded from 130.113.111.210 on Thu, 02 Jul 2015 05:20:43 UTC All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions The Yale Law Journal Vol. 79: 1005, 1970 where other avenues of redress are clearly open is professionally and institutionally immoral. As the Supreme Court stated in NAACP v. Button: "[U]nder the conditions of modern government, litigation may well be the sole practicable avenue open to a minority to petition for redress of grievances."3 There are fashions in all things, including fashions in righteousness, but for the legal profession to succumb to the most recent fashion would be a betrayal of its historical and constitutional role as the advocate of disenfranchised members of our society.Putting aside ...

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