In December 1952, John W. Davis, the senior name partner in one of the nation’s most prominent law firms and the Democratic candidate for President in 1924, appeared before the Supreme Court. He was defending the long-established Constitutional doctrine of “separate but equal” in public education and urged “judicial restraint” in any effort to overturn the Court’s 1896 decision in Plessy v. Ferguson which had blessed that practice as a socially and legally acceptable way of reconciling the competing claims of human equality and social stability in the United States.
In May 1954, in Brown v. Board of Education, the Supreme Court unanimously reversed Plessy, finding that segregated schools were ‘inherently unequal”. The decision made possible a new America that, while still staggeringly unequal, is no longer premised on officially-sanctioned segregation of people by race.
Suppose John W. Davis had won his argument? What if the legions of respected and highly competent lawyers who represented southern states, towns and school districts had succeeded in their efforts to undermine the Brown decision by dragging out the Court’s injunction to dismantle segregation “with all deliberate speed” not simply for 20 years but for 50?
What kind of society would we be living in today if those efforts, supported by many years of precedent, deeply-held social beliefs and substantial economic interests, had succeeded? What role could the United States play in today’s world if we still sanctioned “separate but equal” treatment of our own citizens? How proud would those lawyers now be of their efforts to preserve a status quo that, as many of them must have known, had to fall for our nation to free itself of the legacy of slavery?
Climate change is not slavery or de jure racial segregation, though in truth it will affect the lives of hundreds of millions, perhaps billions, of people throughout the world for decades and quite likely centuries. But the failure of the United States to address its GHG emissions since the 1992 U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change and the prospects for continuing litigation over even the modest EPA efforts now under way to restrict coal plant emissions can be viewed as a similar refusal to recognize the need for fundamental changes.
I believe that lawyers must at least consider whether they wish to be part of a scorched-earth litigation strategy to defer, for as long as possible, our nation’s efforts (and the efforts of other nations) to break free of reliance on coal, which has represented the single greatest source of the Earth’s increased GHG emissions since 2000.
John W. Davis surely believed he was behaving as lawyers should in defending his clients’ actions under then-prevailing law. However, I wonder whether, in retrospect, he would have preferred to be part of the solution instead of the continuing problem that still challenges our society.
If our nation today fails to confront climate change and the other nations of the world follow our dubious lead, how will future generations look at our profession’s role in that tragedy? How will we look at ourselves?
