A century after his birth, Ronald Reagan’s influence on politics still reverberates. The fall of the Berlin Wall, the limited-government coalition within the Republican Party and the careers of justices Sandra Day O’Connor, Anthony Kennedy and Antonin Scalia are all lasting legacies of his presidency. But Reagan is also largely responsible for a more profound change in American law — the consequences of which are still developing to this day: He set the stage for the rise of freedom-oriented public-interest litigation.
America’s first public interest law institutions were the American Civil Liberties Union, founded during World War I, and the NAACP, which hired Charles Hamilton Houston in the 1930s to challenge the constitutionality of segregation. In the decades that followed, these groups leaned increasingly to the left, arguing not so much for individual rights as for group “rights.” By the 1970s, the field of public interest litigation was dominated by groups that advocated for racial quotas, or for constitutional rights to welfare, education, housing or education — all paid for by the taxpayer.
