Beyond Litigation: CLIPI's Legislative Legacy

At our CLIPI gathering last year, Dean Erwin Chemerinsky highlighted something people often overlook: "I know we talk a lot about its litigation, but CLIPI was tremendously important with regard to the impetus for legislative change."

He's right. Center for Law in the Public Interest didn't just win cases, we helped change the law itself.

In 1976, with CLIPI’s direct input, Congress passed the Civil Rights Attorney's Fee Statute. CLIPI attorneys worked with California legislators to obtain an even broader law in 1977.

These statutes established that if a public interest lawyer substantially prevails, the attorney can get attorney's fees.

Why does this matter?

The American model is usually that each side pays its own lawyers. That creates a huge problem: plaintiffs seeking to enforce important civil rights or environmental laws often can't afford lawyers, and there might not be enough chance of prevailing to attract contingency-fee representation, especially for suits seeking injunctive relief rather than money damages.

These attorney's fee statutes changed that equation. They created an incentive for lawyers to represent plaintiffs who otherwise wouldn't have representation.

The impact?

As Erwin noted: "Hundreds of millions of dollars, billions of dollars, of attorney's fees have been awarded under these statutes, and it's encouraged lawyers to have representation that otherwise wouldn't be there."

CLIPI played a crucial role in both advocating for these statutes and then establishing the legal framework for how they would actually work.

Public interest law isn't just about winning individual cases. It's about creating the funding mechanisms and legal structures that make sustained advocacy possible.

That legislative work – typically less visible than courtroom victories – has enabled decades of public interest litigation that simply wouldn't have happened otherwise.