Where Legal Activists Come From.

Lately, we've seen many crocodile tears shed by left-wing lawyers lamenting the judicial decisions which cemented George W. Bush's election victory. How wrong for unelected judges to be imposing themselves on the popular will! they have cried.

Ironically, the Left has for years been relying on courts to accomplish what it could not achieve in the voting booth. To take just one instance among thousands, when the New Jersey state legislature passed a law against taxpayer-financed abortions a few years ago, pro-choice groups didn't lobby politicians or try to elect similarly minded legislators. Instead, they challenged the statute in the New Jersey Supreme Court as a violation of the constitutional guarantee of equal protection. And sure enough, the court struck down the law as "discriminatory."

From fleeing the mentally ill in New York City to defending racial preferences in California to contesting the presidential election in Florida, left-leaning lawyers have successfully waged a "rights revolution" over the last three decades. Trial lawyers increasingly litigate new entitlements for favored groups, establish exotic new individual rights, and overturn well-established legal and legislative prerogatives. As legal savant Walter Olson puts it, "Trial lawyers are now an unelected fourth branch of government."

What is less known is how law schools--as well as the corporate law firms which hire their students--increasingly provision young legal dreadnoughts to fight this rights revolution. The legal profession has always prided itself on providing pro bono services to indigent and unpopular defendants. In that same spirit, law schools have traditionally sponsored free legal clinics as a way to serve the "public good" and teach the art of advocacy. As a result, law school students routinely participate in clinics representing poor clients in, say, landlord-tenant disputes.

In recent years, however, law schools have shifted their focus away from individual needs and toward large, politically charged class-action lawsuits that attempt to force sweeping public policy changes. Each year, thousands of law students across the nation enroll in these courses, which generally include a classroom as well as a clinical component. In the classroom, professors lecture on novel legal theories (such as "environmental racism") which defy traditional common law norms. And in the clinical portion of the course, the students put the theory into action: Seasoned activist lawyers serve as mentors, helping students draft complaints and file briefs on behalf of the latest cause celebre.

Law schools have established these clinics under the misleading rubric of promoting the "public interest." They claim that these clinical courses are steeped in the same venerable tradition of pro bono voluntarism. In reality, though, "public interest litigation" too often means training young lawyers to pursue partisan, often radical, policy goals--at the expense of the public.

Take Tulane Law School's Environmental Clinic, for instance. Tulane students waged a two-year court battle to prevent Shintech, Inc. from receiving government permits to build a $700 million PVC plant in the rural Louisiana neighborhood of St. James Parish. The law school students accused Shintech of "environmental racism" alleging that the plant pollution would unfairly affect the parish's poor, minority residents. Although polls showed that most of the parish residents supported building the plant, the students apparently had a different conception of what was in their interests. And their interminable litigation ultimately forced Shintech to build the plant elsewhere.