Grisinger on Sabin on Environmental Lawyers and the New Deal Order

Over at Jotwell, Joanna Grisinger, Northwestern University, has posted Did Public Interest Lawyers Undermine the New Deal Order?, a review of an article by Paul Sabin, "Environmental Law and the End of the New Deal Order," 33 Law & Hist. Rev. 965 (2015). Here’s a taste:

Paul Sabin’s recent article puts elite liberal lawyers at the center of the story of the demise of the “New Deal order” – that “period of time between the 1930s and 1970s when the federal government, in close partnership with business and labor organizations, greatly expanded its coordination of the national economy and individual industries, as well as its development of natural resources and public infrastructure projects.” (P. 969.) Sabin draws on a wealth of oral histories, interviews, and archival materials to provide an engaging history of public interest environmental lawyers and organizations – including the Environmental Defense Fund, the Center for Law and Social Policy, the Natural Resources Defense Council, and the Sierra Club Legal Defense Fund. These lawyers and law firms challenged New Deal assumptions; in doing so, Sabin argues, they were as key to the fracturing of New Deal-style liberalism as its conservative critics.