TO A HIGH COURT

Proto’s nonfiction account follows law students crusading for a monumental legal victory.

The author looks back to 1971, when he was at George Washington University spearheading Students Challenging Regulatory Agency Procedures, a group fighting the environmental destruction caused by major railroads by pursuing their liability under President Richard Nixon’s new National Environmental Policy Act. Proto led a group of five GWU law students in a legal battle that gradually expanded to pit them against the United States government and bring the case all the way to the Supreme Court. The author draws on copious legal case law history and all kinds of contemporaneous notes and memoranda to present the progression of the case with novelistic flair and pacing. “The ICC was not familiar to any of us,” reads one such passage. “We knew it regulated railroads, pipelines and motor carriers. We acquired the knowledge we needed in four ways: reading history, reading cases, reading Nader, and sharing personal experiences.” Proto fills the text with photos of all of the places and people in his story. He makes the wise decision throughout his narrative to refrain from hyperbole, and this restrained approach very effectively underscores the skill and even the heroism of his central cast of characters (“Our imperative from the fall of 1971 was to discern corporate wrongdoing that harmed the public and to examine the failure of government in its public duty—as prescribed by laws enacted by Congress—to confront and correct it”). Despite his long personal history as a lawyer and writer on legal matters, the author entirely avoids the tedious procedural minutiae that often hamper works of legal nonfiction like this one. The personalities he draws are sharp and ready-made for a Hollywood adaptation, and his insider’s look at how the Supreme Court works is fascinating in its own right, at once enormously informative and genuinely entertaining.

An enjoyably readable and fascinating day-by-day account of a landmark Supreme Court case.