Jefferson Decker, The Other Rights Revolution

Jefferson Decker’s lucid, engaging The Other Rights Revolution examines the origins of conservative public interest organizations in the mid- to late 1970s. Like others who have written about these groups, he begins by tracing their rise as a reaction to the “new liberal state.” Decker does not focus on the conservative reaction to the Warren Court’s constitutional criminal procedure rights revolution; instead, he develops conservative reaction to the increasing authority of the regulatory state and the rise of public litigation by liberal public interest law firms. The reaction begins to coalesce after Lewis F. Powell, Jr., sent a 33-page memorandum to the Chamber of Commerce titled “The Attack on the Free Enterprise System.” Powell claims business “tolerates, if not participates in, its own destruction.” Decker then turns to the 1973 creation of the California-based Pacific Legal Foundation, which used the Powell memorandum for fundraising, and the Mountain States Legal Foundation in Denver. Both intended to defend free enterprise, and to attack the “too-powerful regulatory state.” Chapter 5 discusses the late 1970s effort by conservative lawyers to use public interest law to vindicate their intellectual and ideological vision. Once Ronald Reagan was elected President, many conservative public interest lawyers joined the administration. Decker thoughtfully and fairly looks at the experiences of Secretary of the Interior James Watt, formerly of Mountain States, to discuss the difficulty of transitioning to “governing from the right.”

Ideology · Memorandum · Political science · Politics · Public interest · Sociology · State (computer science) · Law · Law, Rights, and Freedoms