HISTORY OF THE CENTER FOR STUDY OF RESPONSIVE LAW

       The Center for Study of Responsive Law was founded by Ralph Nader in 1968 as his principal office. Since then it has sponsored a wide variety of books, organizing projects, litigation and has hosted hundreds of conferences focusing on government and corporate accountability. One of the Center's primary goals is to empower citizens. The Center focuses on a variety of environmental, consumer and worker health and safety issues.

       In June 1968, Ralph Nader formed his first task force of crusading students, comprised of seven law student volunteers, the group began looking into the Federal Trade Commission (FTC), a sleepy bureaucracy entrusted with protecting consumers from shoddy products, fraudulent business practices and deceptive advertising. The young but resourceful task force members prowled the hallways of the Commission talking with staffers and top officials, and discovered an agency "fat with cronyism, torpid through an inbreeding unusual even for Washington, manipulated by the agents of commercial predators, impervious to governmental and citizen monitoring."

       When the Nader FTC report was released in January 1969, Senator Abraham Ribicoff praised its youthful authors (and implicitly indicted the press and his own institution, the Congress): "Bureaucracy being what it is, I am fascinated by your ability to get in so deep, and get so much information. I am sure that you gentlemen are the envy of the large number of reporters here." The report eventually triggered a major revamping of the FTC headquarters and its field offices. As if to signal its transformation, the Commission soon thereafter launched a major investigation of the structure and practices of the food industry.

       By 1969, Nader had become a known, trusted and admired presence in the nation's political life. Inspired by the success of the FTC report, thousands of idealistic students clamored to work for him. Out of the crush of admirers, Nader began hiring a handful of dedicated, bright young people to amplify his efforts. Charged with looking into the performance of key government agencies and researching ignored social problems, Nader's ad hoc task forces were soon turning out explosive reports that made official Washington sit up and notice. Journalist William Greider, then a reporter for the Washington Post, dubbed the investigative SWAT teams "Nader's Raiders," a tagline that stuck. It was a term that Nader initially disliked, believing that it trivialized the study groups and prompted a cult of personality. He later conceded that Greider's coinage gave the students' exposès a certain panache and publicity-draw.

       By the summer of 1969, Nader decided he needed a standing institutional home for his special brand of citizen action. With the help of Gordon Sherman and other funders, Nader founded his first group, the Center for Study of Responsive Law. Work at "the Center" was intense, and the pay modest ($150 to $300 a month). Yet few summer jobs in Washington in the late 1960s and early 1970s had as much cachet and challenge.

       By the second summer, 200 "Nader's Raiders" were selected from among 30,000 applicants. "I think one-third of Harvard Law School applied," Harrison Wellford, then the director of the Center, told a reporter. The task forces were charged with investigating corruption and incompetence at the Interstate Commerce Commission, the now-defunct agency which regulated trucking and railroad rates (The Interstate Commerce Omission, by Robert C. Fellmeth, 1970); documenting the health hazards of air pollution made worse by irresponsible businesses and complicit politicians (Vanishing Air, by John Esposito, 1970); and exposing the Food and Drug Administration's lax oversight of the food industry (The Chemical Feast, by James Turner, 1971). It is a measure of the Raiders' impact that their first four reports had combined sales of over 450,000.

       Nader presented the reports he sponsored as exemplary exercises of citizenship designed to inspire others to do the same. "Can we diminish or lose our rights," he asked rhetorically, "if we do not use them with some degree of constancy?" Besides exposing unseemly conduct, Nader considered the task forces a model for transforming society -- "a social innovation that will produce just and lasting benefits for the country as these young people generate new values and create new roles for their professions." For the generation that earnestly exhorted its peers to "give a damn," Nader proposed a means by which one person could make a difference. "Almost every significant breakthrough has come from the spark, the drive, the initiative of one person," Nader declared. "You must believe this."

       In subsequent summers, new "raids" were launched against the nation's worsening water pollution and the lack of an effective federal response (Water Wasteland, by David Zwick and Marcy Benstock, 1971); the secrecy, conflicts of interest and concentration of power held by First National City Bank (Citibank, by David Leinsdorf and Donald Etra, 1971); the indignities and frauds practiced by nursing homes (Old Age: The Last Segregation, by Claire Townsend, 1971); the dangerous use of pesticides on agricultural crops (Sowing the Wind, by Harrison Wellford, 1972); the rampant despoliation of land in California by developers and speculators (Politics of Land, by Robert C. Fellmeth, 1972); and the degeneration of the Community Mental Health Centers Act into a mismanaged, ineffective bureaucratic boondoggle (The Madness Establishment, by Franklin D. Chu and Sharland Trotter, 1972). Seventeen books had been completed by 1972.

       Since Nader had modest funds with which to finance the proliferating study groups, he paid people in psychic instead of real income. The students received their own bylines, participated in their own press conferences, and were given the opportunity to develop their own expertise and reputations. "Ralph replicated himself through his own selflessness," is how Mark Green, one of Nader's first protégées and closest collaborators, described it; he helped new leaders to be born.

       The inspiration came directly from Thomas Jefferson, who had written, "I know of no safe depository of the ultimate powers of society but the people themselves." But Jefferson, of course, could not have envisioned how monied special interests, official secrecy, procedural complexities and the brute size of the nation would erode the sinews of government accountability. Nor could James Madison, author of the famous Federalist No. 10 essay, have predicted how competing special-interest factions might not yield the public good, contrary to his predictions. The creation of a organization to represent the people as a whole -- "the public interest" -- was a bold, innovative development in American politics at the time. It represented a creative attempt to reclaim Jefferson's faith in "the people themselves."

       Unlike muckrakers of the past who took satisfaction in unmasking scandal and then moving on, Nader wanted to experiment with new strategies of citizen action and establish organizations that could empower "the little guy." As for his political agenda, he once described his hopes for "nothing less than the qualitative reform of the Industrial Revolution." As a Harvard-trained attorney with a encyclopedic memory and stern moral conviction, Nader had a keen appreciation for the dynamics of unaccountable power in American society. Equally important, he saw that the consumer -- active, informed, questioning -- could play a critical, transforming role in making business, government and other powerful institutions more accountable to the American people.