Choosing the Public Interest: Essays From the First Public Interest Research Group

By Sam Simon

They blazed new trails for people seeking a better world. These are their stories.

In 1970, a group of young people chose to take their values to work at a new sort of profession. They formed the Public Interest Research Group, a nonpartisan, nonprofit voice for c

• Language: English
• Publisher: Center for Public Interest Research
• Release date: Nov 7, 2023
• ISBN: 9798989440719

Book preview

Choosing The Public Interest is full of poignant stories from people who helped move the country in a better, more sensible and sustainable direction. Their standing invitation to future generations is a powerful one: Read on, join in, make a difference.

Hon. Donna F. Edwards

Member of Congress (2008-2017)

Choosing the Public Interest

Essays From the First Public Interest Research Group

Copyright © 2023 by Center for Public Interest Research

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means without written permission of the author.

ISBN 979-8-9894407-0-2

E-ISBN 979-8-9894407-1-9

Published by:

Center for Public Interest Research

The views expressed in these essays are the authors’ own and do not necessarily represent those of the publisher, PIRG, or The Public Interest Network. Quoted dialogue represents the authors’ best recollections, not a word-for-word reproduction of actual conversation.

Dedication

In honor of the future generations of advocates who dedicate their careers to the public interest.

In memory of our colleagues

James Welch

Andy Spanogle

Karen Ferguson

Donald K. Ross

James Turner

In appreciation for our opportunity

Ralph Nader

Contents

Foreword

Introduction

Become a Nader Raider

Samuel A. Simon

Change the World & Change Your Life

Donald K. Ross

The Experience of a Lifetime

Peter Petkas

My Path to a Career in Public Service

Christian S. White

Finding my Future

Karen Ferguson

Accept Your Calling

Robert Vaughn

Reflections on Our Experiences at Ralph Nader’s Public Interest Research Group

Thomas H. Stanton

The Foundation of a Life’s Work

Karin Sheldon

My Choice of Public Interest Law and the Journey to PIRG and Beyond

Joan (Formerly Katz) Woodward

Working for a Great Visionary

Sharlene Kranz

Afterword from The Public Interest Network

Appreciation

About the Authors

Foreword

It was a first meeting of a dozen justice seekers on July 1, 1970, in a suite of offices on 15th Street NW near the Washington Post, that led to over fifty years of public interest law advocacy. In the office reception area, most of the young lawyers who made up the first PIRG, or Public Interest Research Group, assembled. They sat on the carpet of the yet-to-be-furnished office for the first and only orientation session.

Most were just out of law school; one was a law professor on a sabbatical; another was an escapee from a corporate law firm who worked closely with me to enact the Occupational Safety and Health Act of 1970. A third, six years out of law school, was looking for a major subject of importance to pursue.

There was one non-lawyer providing the daily service and logistics for this dynamic office with savvy and smooth efficiency.

These young advocates had a number of common principles. They wished to use the law to build a more just society. Moreover, they were willing to forego better paid corporate law firm and government jobs in order to test their venturesome curiosity in building a new kind of public interest law firm.

I decided on a simple way to get the best from each of them. I offered a dozen distinct pursuits for exposé and reform, letting each select what intrigued them—first come, first serve.

Little did I anticipate, nor probably did they, that their choices would lead most of them to become leaders, even pioneers, in their chosen fields of work that year, and for nearly half a century. Pension rights, civil service reform, whistleblower protection, auto safety, environmental protection, consumer protection, organizing student PIRGs, communications policy, tax policy, and the operation of government-sponsored enterprises have borne the bold imprints of their enduring efforts.

At the time, I did envision a rolling year-long class of young lawyers year after year to launch waves of energetic, self-motivated leaders fanning out in Washington and around the country starting or expanding civic organizations. Indeed, there was a second such PIRG team in 1971. At that point I made the decision to start Public Citizen, the Center for Auto Safety, and other organizations intended to last for generations.

The two models could have coexisted, except that they were competing for the same talent. Another factor was involved. Whatever inspired graduating students, coming out of the antiwar, civil rights, and other movements in the late 1960s, to take an experimental year with no assurance of either an identified topic or job security was beginning to wane. Other public interest groups, recruiting from this pool of committed talent, were also starting with defined missions and less occupational uncertainty. State-based PIRGs are, however, continuing their work with students from many campuses in many states who have established US PIRG in Washington, DC, as their national voice.

For many years, Sam Simon, whose introduction and narrative open this collective fascinating memoir of the first PIRG, has valued this formative experience and kept in touch with his colleagues. It has been his drive and persistence that has rescued these memories both for history and for motivating emulation by present and future generations of law school graduates and graduates in other specialties as well.

Take risks, pioneer, open new structured avenues for peace, justice, and opportunity for millions of people whose names you will never know. Lawyers and other professions should be more engaged in building democratic societies than in defending plutocrats bent on various forms of harmful domination over the unrepresented people.

These young lawyers, leading with the first PIRG, have my deep gratitude for showing a life-long dedication to their causes and the legacy of possibilities for how a few can do so much for the many.

Ralph Nader

Washington, DC

Fall 2023

Introduction

In 1969, Ralph Nader decided to begin a new phase of his consumer advocacy by forming a public interest law firm. His 1965 book, Unsafe at Any Speed, and a series of research projects brought him and his ideas into the headlines. The United States was experiencing numerous challenges in the ’60s, from anti-war to anti-establishment movements. There were assassinations and campus shootings of demonstrators. And there was an emerging legal movement called public interest law. Its distinguishing feature was to pursue change and justice through legal reforms and challenges. Central to that movement was Ralph Nader’s vision of a public interest law firm called Public Interest Research Group (PIRG), premised on using the legal system to bring accountability and change to both government and industry.

A side effect of this vision was to create career paths for young lawyers who didn’t particularly want to enter the world of corporate law and represent vested interests. At the time, working in the public interest was not a real choice for most law students. There wasn’t a unique area of law or firms known as public interest law. Those groups that did exist did not have a presence in the recruitment office of major law schools.

In this collection, you will read essays from a group of lawyers that did the unlikely—if not the unthinkable—in 1969 and 1970 and joined the first Public Interest Research Group, thereby becoming their own pioneers. Inspired by the vision, energy, and voice of Ralph Nader, they chose to follow their hearts. The ten stories outline how they managed to follow their youthful passion to change the world for the better, take an enormous career risk, and show that change, at a time when it was desperately needed, could be made by pursuing the rule of law, not violence.

The perception of many in the late ‘60s and early ‘70s, much like today, was that democracy itself and the future of America were unstable and uncertain. This group chose to try and rescue the system through the pursuit of legal remedies and advocacy, upholding the rule of law. They sought through their actions not to dismantle the government as some have suggested, but instead to make the government work as intended, free of undue influence by special interest. They envisioned a public voice at the table.

Each of these essays represents a unique journey. You’ll learn what inspired us to join PIRG, what we did, and how that choice inspired the rest of our lives. Sadly, two of our colleagues authoring essays in this collection—Donald Ross and Karen Ferguson, two of the brightest lights of our cohort—passed away during the writing process. Luckily, their pieces remain behind to pay tribute to their contributions.

All of us were fundamentally changed by our experience pioneering Ralph’s Public Interest Research Group. Now, more than fifty years later, we hope to demonstrate that a career as a public interest lawyer can also provide paths to meaningful and fruitful personal lives, and inspire others to take that leap.

Karen Ferguson*, Sharlene Kranz, Peter Petkas, Donald Ross*, Karin Sheldon, Sam Simon, Thomas Stanton, Robert Vaughn, Chris White, Joan (nee Katz) Woodward

Become a Nader Raider

Samuel A. Simon

"B e careful when picking your first professional position, I often warn law students. It may determine the rest of your career." I say that from experience.

This essay is a reflection on how my decision to join Ralph Nader in 1970 ultimately shaped the rest of my professional and personal life. Like so many other things in my life journey, Ralph and the Public Interest Research Group (PIRG) came along at just the right time. It is as if it was my destiny.

Technically, the journey started July 1, 1970, the day we were supposed to report to work at 1025 15th Street, Washington, DC. Ralph Nader was already an unlikely national hero at the age of thirty-six. His work on behalf of consumers and his personality at the time persuaded me to take an unlikely path and follow my passion. I hope that my story and the others in this book will encourage a new generation to take the less traveled courses to serve the public interest.

The Long and Winding Road to Ralph

As a kid, I was a troublemaker who was always in trouble. I was born in 1945 in El Paso, Texas, Jewish in the wake of World War II and the Holocaust. Perhaps I became rebellious because my family always wanted us, the children, to keep our heads down, a typical caution for being Jewish in a non-Jewish world.

I was also a bit of a news junky. I liked going to the movies as much for the newsreels as the movie itself. At home, the radio was constantly blaring. (We did not have a TV until I was ten years old.) Not only did I listen to the news, but I would also get riled up at what I perceived to be injustices in the world. My first effort to change that came when I was fourteen years old.

The El Paso City Council had imposed an eleven p.m. curfew for kids younger than seventeen. I believed the rule was racist, aimed at Mexican Americans, since the police didn’t enforce it in middle-class neighborhoods like where I lived. I did my research, and without telling anyone (especially my parents), I rode the bus to city hall to attend a city council meeting. I lectured the council members about how unfair, even unconstitutional, the law was and urged them to repeal it.

The council members were amused and told me to wait until my children were teenagers. I would understand. I did learn from that experience a tactic that I would regularly use working for Ralph in 1970: standing up and speaking out attracts the attention of the media to your cause. My decision to take the bus by myself down to city hall at fourteen years old to complain to the city council made headlines in the afternoon newspaper in El Paso, Texas. My parents were furious.

I would continue to stir the pot in El Paso and as a student in school. I got into a verbal altercation once with a high school teacher when she attacked the creation of the Tennessee Valley Authority as communism. She kicked me out of class and sent me to the principal while the class cheered. In college at Texas Western (now the University of Texas at El Paso), I was elected to the student senate. For a political science class, I decided to infiltrate the local John Birch Society in order to write a paper about them. I connected with a local lawyer to ensure I wouldn’t get into legal trouble nor any reputational problems. I wanted to be able to prove, if need be, that I did not believe in the group’s agenda. What did happen is that the lawyer became impressed with my passion and would later guide me to a legal career.

Despite this passion for justice, I had no personal vision for my career. I had no models in the family. My dad was a traveling salesman, a Willy Lohman character ala Death of a Salesman, with no college education. Mom had never finished high school. They were determined that my four sisters and I get a college education. They imagined us settling down and leading quiet lives in El Paso. Oddly, all of us moved away to engage the broader world in our own way.

As for me, the only boy in the family, they were worried. I was getting into trouble—a lot. They encouraged me to enter the Army as an officer, like my West Point cadet brother-in-law. I went along mainly because I didn’t know what else to do with my life. There were no models of professional engagement within my family except for my mother’s sister, my Aunt Lena. Oddly, one of the first women licensed lawyers in Florida and Texas, she actually served as a legal secretary.

So I signed up for ROTC as a freshman in college and did very well. Indeed, I received a prestigious full ROTC scholarship that paid for my last two years of college. Everything seemed to be on an ordinary course. Except that same sophomore year, I met and fell in love with Susan, who continues to be my life partner today. So rather than taking that big Army scholarship to some fancy school, I stayed at Texas Western, lived at home, and married in the summer of 1966, between my junior and senior years.

As remarkable as falling in love was, nothing extraordinary was happening on the professional front. I expected to go into the Army, retire at forty-something with a generous pension, and then find a second career. A vision my parents helped paint and enormously endorsed.

As graduation neared, the world was changing. The civil rights movement and the Vietnam War had exploded onto the scene. Not only was my heart with the protestors, but the news was already filled with stories of the high death toll in Vietnam, especially among young second lieutenants. I needed to figure something out. I did not want to end up in Vietnam.

The lawyer who had helped me on the John Birch Society matter suggested I consider law school. Susan and I had a number of friends in law school already. I noted that most politicians in Washington were lawyers. Law school seemed like a good idea, and my ROTC teacher, the professor of military science (PMS), assured me that I was eligible for a three-year deferment from active duty. I just needed to apply during my senior year. We had a plan.

The plan fell apart almost as quickly as we put it together. It took me two tries to get admitted into law school. Then the Army changed its mind. The Vietnam War was going badly. That high death rate among young lieutenants created a severe shortage, and the Department of the Army canceled all the deferments for the ROTC scholarship students. That meant me. In the spring of 1967, I received orders to report to the Army Infantry School in Fort Benning, Georgia. Law school began the first week of September.

It was a traumatic turn of events. We appealed my orders, asking the Department of the Army to let me go to law school because they had promised that two years earlier. A long shot, made feasible by the generosity of my teacher, the PMS, an active-duty captain, who was also upset. He promised to support and shepherd my appeal.

Upon my graduation in June of 1967, neither Susan nor I knew if we would end up in the University of Texas School of Law class of 1970 first-year cohort, or the 1967 Fort Benning Georgia second lieutenant entry training cohort. We spent the summer of 1967 in Houston near Susan’s mother, who would die from breast cancer in early August, followed two weeks later by my father’s death in El Paso from kidney disease. We were devastated, struggling, and had no idea what the future held for us.

It was not until the middle of August 1967 that we got the news. I still remember the phone call: The Vice Chief of Staff of the United States Army has decided to grant your deferment to go to law school as an exception to standing policy.

UT Law was a heady place for me, a top-tier law school and one of the largest in the country. My law school experience was transformational for me. I grew up, and I grew bold there. It was also what led me to Ralph.

I was scared from the start that I could not compete, so I spent most of that first year obsessed with studying. My hard work paid off, and I was selected to be a member of the Texas Law Review. Eventually, I would graduate in the top ten percent of my class. Even at the University of Texas, arguing and making trouble seemed to be positive assets.

Finding Ralph

I don’t remember precisely how Peter Petkas, Jim Welch, Joe Tom Easley,