What Would California Look Like Without CLIPI?

What Would California Look Like Without CLIPI?

It's a question worth asking.

USC Communications Dean Geoffrey Cowan once put it to a panel of legal scholars: "How different would Los Angeles be, or California be, without CLIPI?"

Loyola Law School, Los Angeles Professor Dan Selmi responded by looking at what California's legal landscape looked like in 1971. There was something called the California Environmental Quality Act, but nobody knew what it meant. There was limited air and water pollution legislation. No Coastal Commission. As Dan put it: "Talk about a canvas. They were working on a clean slate."

CLIPI's contribution was to integrate environmental considerations into government decision-making. That happened through cases like Friends of Mammoth and No Oil, which established CEQA as a meaningful tool for environmental review.

Dan also noted something often overlooked: while most public interest law groups at the time were focused on national issues, CLIPI did much of its work on California law. That focus helped make California a model for other states.

University of California, Berkeley - School of Law Dean Erwin Chemerinsky added a broader view, pointing to CLIPI's impact across multiple areas: environmental protection, civil rights litigation like Blake v. LAPD, corporate accountability through the Northrop case and the False Claims Act, and civil liberties work like the Sundance case.

"If you put it together," Erwin said, "you get a sense of what a huge difference could be made."

Without CLIPI, California's environmental review framework, its approach to civil rights enforcement, and its public interest law community would look very different.