Jonathan Weisgall was a new associate at Covington & Burling in 1975 when a partner asked him to take a call about a possible new pro bono client. “Something about atomic bombs,” he was told.
Ever since, Weisgall has been representing, part time or full time, the displaced residents of the Bikini Atoll in the South Pacific, site of dozens of U.S. nuclear bomb tests from 1946 to 1958. Their land was not just taken; some of it was vaporized, and high radioactive levels to this day have kept residents from returning.
