Alan Morrison, Lerner Family Associate Dean for Public Interest and Public Service Law and Professorial Lecturer in Law at The George Washington University Law School—a winner of the National Law Journal’s Lifetime Achievement award—has dedicated his law career to public interest.
Morrison, who is credited for creating entirely new areas of law, co-founded one of the nation’s preeminent public-interest law firms—Public Citizen Litigation Group (PCLG)—with Ralph Nader in 1972.
He’s considered a consummate legal theorist and appellate advocate with 20 Supreme Court arguments under his belt, has written 50 law-review and other journal articles, edited and co-authored eight books and penned essays and op-eds in the hundreds.
Morrison, who is 85 years old, currently teaches civil procedure and constitutional law at George Washington Law, and previously taught at Harvard Law School, New York University, Stanford Law School, University of Hawaii Law School and American University law schools.
He joined George Washington Law in 2009 where he is responsible for creating pro bono opportunities for students, bringing a wide range of public interest programs to the law school and encouraging students to seek positions in the non-profit and government sectors.
From 1968 to 1972, Morrison was the Assistant U.S. Attorney and Assistant Chief of Civil Division, S.D.N.Y.; from 1966 to 1968, he was an associate at Cleary, Gottlieb, Steen & Hamilton; and from 1959 to 1963, he was a Commissioned Officer in the U.S. Navy.
Watch Dean Morrison receive his National Law Journal’s Lifetime Achievement award.
Morrison recently spoke with NLJ for an interview about his prominent and extensive career in public interest.
The following Q&A has been edited for length and clarity.
National Law Journal: You’ve dedicated your career to public interest work. Why did you choose this path?
Alan Morrison: In part, I stumbled into it. I always had a public service inclination. My father was a person who always looked after other people and did what he thought was the right thing to do. My mother was a mild protester, mostly about things that affected her life.
I had [worked] in the office of the U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York one summer while I was in law school, and I had an opportunity to go back there. I did mostly civil cases and I realized it was a kind of an evolution. I realized that I couldn’t go back to a big firm because one, I didn’t care what they were doing—I didn’t want to just move money around—and the second reason was that I had a tremendous amount of responsibility at the U.S. Attorney’s Office, and the notion of going back and carrying somebody’s briefcase around for them didn’t seem like a very good idea.
I came upon a book by a reporter named Morton Mintz called “America Inc.” (1971), and he wrote about how our country was not responding to the needs of the people. And there are lots of things that he said in the book that struck me as being something that I could do something about.
NLJ: How did you meet Ralph Nader?
AM: I happened to have a student working for me [at the U.S. Attorney’s Office], and he had worked for Ralph Nader. He said to me, “What are you going to do when you grow up and stop being an Assistant U.S. Attorney?” I told him that I’m thinking about trying to set up a public interest law firm. [This student] said he was going to write to Ralph and tell him about me.
I went on vacation and came back from vacation at the end of August, and there was a message [from] Ted at Ralph Nader’s office. Ralph had just formed Public Citizen. Ted said, “We want to set up a litigation group and we would like to have you come down to talk to Ralph about it.”
[When I met with Ralph] he asked me “What are you going to do?” and so I gave him a whole bunch of things that I wanted to do. A couple weeks later Ralph called me and said “we can do this.”
NLJ: You are said to have created entirely new areas of law. What are those?
AM: What I wanted to do when I started this job with Ralph was to increase the availability and affordability of legal services, and nobody was taking on the legal profession.
The area of law that I started was commercial speech and getting it protected by the First Amendment. So we brought this First Amendment case on behalf of the pharmacies, challenging the Virginia Board of Pharmacy.
The second thing when I got to the Public Citizen, is we started the minimum fee schedule case.
NLJ: You are responsible for our modern separation-of-powers doctrine. Tell me about that.
AM: I had a whole bunch of cases involving separation of powers. The legislative veto case, which was one of the Supreme Court that struck down 210 federal statutes involving the legislative veto, and then I did a bunch of other cases all on separation of powers grounds, some attacking what the administration had done, some attacking what Congress had done. I litigated and lost the case involving the sentencing guidelines and the applicability of the separation of powers to the Sentencing Commission. So I did all those cases that nobody else had done. These were the things that I’d set out to do on my little list of things do. We won a lot of cases, but we didn’t win them all. But we won a lot.
NLJ: What other cases were groundbreaking?
AM: We were one of the first groups to start looking at the settlements in class actions. A lot of these settlements were cases in which the lawyers were getting all the money and the class members were getting almost nothing. And the judges were approving the settlements because they got rid of these cases that they didn’t like, and we started objecting and we were the proverbial skunk at the garden party. Eventually, we got that straightened out. And it is a completely different world now in terms of class actions.
NLJ: Which case are you most proud of?
AM: Well, the legislative veto case—the Chadha case—you know, when you declare 210 laws unconstitutional, that’s kind of a big deal. But it’s also a big deal because I teach it now. And it’s actually taught in about three or four different courses at this law school and every law student in the country studies this case. And so that kind of special.
NLJ: Which case—a win or a loss—impacted you most profoundly?
AM: The separation of powers case—that I feel most unhappy about losing—involved the Sentencing Commission. Congress had created the Sentencing Commission and had a mixture of federal judges and government lawyers and others on it, and they had the authority to literally create mandatory sentencing ranges that the federal judges had to follow. I also thought this was a terrible delegation of legislative authority and that Congress should be writing these. I also thought the federal judges shouldn’t be judging cases and at the same time writing the rules for cases. I argued the case in the Supreme Court and I lost eight to one. Eventually, the Supreme Court said that it was unconstitutional to have mandatory guidelines, so that made the loss a little less stinging.
NLJ: Tell me about how you got into teaching.
AM: Larry Tribe, who was a law school classmate and in the same study group at Harvard, was teaching at Harvard and he said to me, “Alan, you should come up and teach for a year here at the law school.” So I picked up and moved the family to Boston for a year in 1978 to ’79.
I finally stopped teaching there in 1991 for a variety of reasons. But meanwhile, I started teaching part time at NYU.
[And later in 2009] I got a call from Fred Lawrence (the dean of George Washington Law School then) and he said, “We have just gotten a large grant to set up an Associate Dean for Public Interest Law and we’d like to have you come and talk to us about it.” So I said “sure.”
People say to me, when are you going to stop teaching? And I used to say, “When I start drooling.” Now I say, “When they catch me drooling.” I just love going into the classroom. And I get to teach first year students—and what can be better than that?
This article was originally published on Law. com.