To a High Court

It is the fall of 1971. Richard Nixon is in the White House. The nation is still in turmoil over the war in Vietnam. The national dissonance has preoccupied Congress; not only the war but also the need to recognize new values through law: dislodging corporate comfort before regulatory agencies, protecting consumers, enhancing the environment, and protecting the public’s health. 

At George Washington University, five law students sign up for a course that allows involvement with a real-life project they determine in lieu of a final exam. They start a group project targeting the corporate greed of the nation’s railroads, and the failure of the government to protect the environment and challenge the nation’s oldest regulatory agency, the Interstate Commerce Commission. They want compliance with a new law – the National Environmental Policy Act – and its application to freight rates, asserting that the nation's railroads discouraged the collection and use of recyclable materials and encouraged the unnecessary mining and exploitation of natural resources.

The group’s name: Students Challenging Regulatory Agency Procedures, or SCRAP, and in the Spring 1972, long after the course ended and after eight months of battle before the Commission, they sued the United States. As success emerged, their adversaries stymied, the critical legal question remained: Does SCRAP have “standing to sue,” or the right to be in court at all? That question reached the United States Supreme Court. In To a High Court: Five Bold Law Students Challenge Corporate Greed and Change the Law (50th Anniversary Edition, April 2023), Neil Thomas Proto, then SCRAP’s chair, provides a gripping, first-person account of when he and his classmates dared to take on one of the most powerful industries in America, as well as the federal government, and won one of the most expansive decisions on standing in Supreme Court history.

Proto builds a narrative with photographs and actual dialogue to take readers through their battle against the government, powerful law firms, the nation’s railroads, and national environmental organizations – all while SCRAP’s members are studying law, only blocks from the unsettledness in the White House and amid the threat and reality of anti-war demonstrations. Using excerpts from court transcripts, as well as the papers of Justices Douglas, Marshall, and Blackmun, Proto details the roadblocks, in law and in culture, SCRAP encountered to reach the Supreme Court. 

Fifty years after the 1973 Supreme Court ruling in favor of SCRAP, To A High Court offers a timely and pertinent look at the U.S. legal system. A decision, and a group, that is still to this day discussed, debated, and taught in law schools throughout the nation. As Proto puts it: “SCRAP still rankles. Fifty years later.”

About the Author:

Neil Thomas Proto’s public service and private practice in law includes forty-five years of experience in land use, environmental, and federal litigation, teaching at Yale University and Georgetown University, and writing and speaking on a broad range of cultural and legal matters.

As a law student at The George Washington University, he chaired Students Challenging Regulatory Agency Procedures (SCRAP), which resulted in the first United States Supreme Court decision to consider the National Environmental Policy Act (1973). In the fall of 1973, Mr. Proto joined the United States Department of Justice as an appellate attorney in the Land (now Environment) and Natural Resources Division. He briefed and argued cases involving public lands, Native Americans, and the environment in United States Courts of Appeals. He is the recipient of the Department of Justice Special Commendation Award for Outstanding Service and the Environment and Natural Resources Division Award for Meritorious Service.

During the administration of President Jimmy Carter, Proto served as general counsel to the President's Nuclear Safety Oversight Committee, chaired by future Interior Secretary Bruce Babbitt. He was appointed a visiting lecturer at Yale University in 1988 and 1989. In private practice he represented historians, including David McCullough and Doris Kearns Goodwin, in the successful battle against the Disney Theme Park in Virginia, and, on behalf of Native Hawaiians and Hawaii crafted the law that transferred the sacred site of Kaho’olawe Island from the United States to Hawaii. Beginning in 1990, while in private practice in Washington, DC, Proto was an adjunct professor at Georgetown University's McCourt School of Public Policy. Proto also has authored two other books: The Rights of My People, Liliuokalani’s Enduring Battle with the United States, 1893-1917 (2009), and Fearless: A. Bartlett Giamatti and the Battle for Fairness in America (2019), which was a finalist in Biography for the Next Generation Indie Book Awards and received the Bronze Award in Biography by Foreword Reviews.

Proto is a member of the District of Columbia Bar and the United States Supreme Court Bar. He continues to reside in Washington, D.C., occupied by writing, teaching, and exploring new creative threads. His play, The Reckoning, Pecora for the Public was produced in Seattle in 2016. His interests frequently take him abroad, as a Fellow, to Royal Geographical Society conferences and events; to the Pacific Northwest for hiking, sailing, kayaking, and snowshoeing; and to the Northeast to maintain close ties with family members and friends.