ABSTRACT
Public interest law is the outgrowth of diverse efforts stretching deep into American history to secure legal representation for the powerless and disenfranchised. The legal aid movement of the 1800s, Progessive Era reformers such as Louis Brandeis, the civil liberties activism of the American Civil Liberties Union in the early 1900s, the watershed civil rights cases of the 1950s. Around the turn of the twentieth century, the courts became a battleground where new protective labor and consumer legislation came up against legal doctrines that defended unregulated business enterprise. The civil rights movement is the crucible in which modern public interest law was forged. The public interest law firms that have worked on behalf of environmental, consumer, and many other issues since the 1960s owe much of their organization, and inspiration to the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People Legal Defense and Education Fund and its landmark victories in the 1950s and 1960s.
