David Ettinger recommends
Dan Selmi's book, "
Dawn
at Mineral King Valley: The Sierra Club, The Disney Company, and the Rise
of Environmental Law," which was recently published by the University
of Chicago Press. The book tells the backstory of the landmark U.S. Supreme Court
decision,
Sierra Club v. Morton (1972) 405 U.S. 727. It's not just
about the Supreme Court litigation, although there's plenty of good stuff about
party and amicus brief strategizing, and uses justices' private notes to
reveal some of the Court's internal deliberations. Much of the book is
about how Walt Disney outmaneuvered actress Janet Leigh and her husband to get
picked to build a large ski resort in (spoiler alert) what is now a resort-less
part of Sequoia National Park, and about the battles over the project of the
U.S. Forest Service (and the Department of Agriculture) versus the National Park
Service (and the Interior Department) during the Johnson and Nixon
administrations. The book is very well written and the amount of research that went into it remarkable. This is a great read for appellate practitioners and non-lawyers
alike.
Posts
