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BC-LEGAL 2takes
By ROBERT LINDSEY
c.1978 N.Y. Times News Service
    LOS ANGELES - Business interests, borrowing a tactic from their foes
in consumer movements, are increasingly using conservative
''public-interest'' legal foundations to fight government regulation
and environmental reform.
    At least eight such tax-exempt foundations - in Atlanta, Chicago,
Denver, Kansas City, Philadelphia, Sacramento, Washington and
Springfield, Ill. - are now in operation.
    Most were established during the past year and are patterned on the
Pacific Legal Foundation of Sacramento, which was started four years
ago by a group of California business leaders to counterbalance the
growing impact of liberal legal foundations and organizations such as
the Sierra Club and the National Resources Defense Council.
    ''We felt somebody had to be there in court to give the other side:
a lot of times in the case of jobs, for instance, we felt the public
interest wasn't really being represented by the public-interest law
firms,'' said J. Robert Fluor, chairman of the Fluor Corp., a large
California construction-engineering concern, and also chairman of the
National Legal Center for the Public Interest, a consortium of
regional private-enterprise-supported legal foundations.
    While success has been mixed for the conservative legal foundations,
and some are not old enough to have tested their capabilities,
several have begun to win substantial victories against government
regulatory agencies and environemental and consumer groups. Successes
include the following:
    - In Fresno, Calif., the Pacific Legal Foundation recently won a
court decision against the Interior Department, blocking, at least
for now, implementation of a regulation limiting to 160 acres the
size of farms irrigated by federally subsidized water projects.
    - In New Orleans, the Atlanta-based Southeast Legal Foundation won a
United States Circuit Court of Appeals decision upholding an Atlanta
factory owner who refused to allow an Occupational Safety and Health
Administration inspector into his plant without a search warrant.
    - In Knoxville, Tenn., the Washington Legal Foundation was granted
the first jury trial review of a Federal Mine Safety inspector's
charges of safety violations in a coal mine. The mine owner said that
he had been harassed by an inspector and that no violations had
occurred.
    Scores of other lawsuits brought by the groups and cases in which
they have intervened are pending. For example, Chicago's Mid-America
Legal Foundation is opposing a suit brought by the Audubon Society
and the National Resources Defense Council to force the U.S.
Export-Import Bank to prepare governmental impact statements for all
loans made within foreign countries.
(MORE)
    
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LOS ANGELES: countries.
    In Denver, the six-month-old Mountain States Legal Foundation has
begun a legal assault on several Environmental Protection Agency
restrictions regarding strip mining and resource development activity
in the West.
    ''We're presenting the other side to counter-balance the extreme
environmental groups that are trying to block the economic
development of the West,'' said James G. Watt, a former vice chairman
of the Federal Power Commission who is president of the Denver
foundation.
    In explaining what he said were the basic principles guiding the
organization, Watt said:
    ''We're not broad-based, we're narrow-based: we believe in the free
enterprise system. We believe in private property, we believe in
individual liberties.''
    Similar comments were made by executives of other conservative legal
foundations around the country.
    Robert Best, assistant legal director of the Pacific Legal
Foundation, said his organization did not consider itself an
instrument of business, but a defender of certain principles: ''free
enterprise, private property rights, the concept of limited
government and liberties of individual citizens.''
    He said the group, which has a staff of 15 lawyers and an annual
budget of $1.2 million, had instituted or joined more than 100 major
legal proceedings since its founding and ''we have prevailed in 80
percent of the cases that reached final judgment.''
    Fluor estimated that about $500,000 had been contributed by various
business interests to establish the network of regional litigation
centers patterned after the Pacific Legal Foundation.
    And Ben Blackburn, a former Republican U.S. representative from
Georgia who heads the Atlanta center, said support for continuing
them was coming principally from three sources: individual
contributors, including small businessmen; corporations, and private
charitable foundations.
    The increasing number of politically conservative, public-interest
legal organizations has troubled officials of some of the original
public-interest groups, essentially liberal organizations.
    ''I think you have a contradiction in terms,'' John Phillips, one of
the founders of the Center for Law in the Public Interest, here said.
He said public-interest legal groups ''are supposed to represent the
unrepresented. Here you have public-interest groups financed largely
by corporate interests, who already are represented. I think it
raises very serious questions about their tax status.''
    Officials of the new, conservative public-interest organizations
defend their mission, saying that many Americans are not sympathetic
to such causes as minority preference in hiring programs, no-growth
zoning, and certain environmental regulations, including some that
have limited the creation of new jobs.
    ''For too long, these so-called public-interest law firms have had a
very narrow definition of the public interest, representing a
no-growth posture for industry,'' William Slocum, a lawyer in the
Chicago foundation, asserted. Increasingly, he said, labor unions
were collaborating with the conservative foundations to combat
regulations that limit jobs.
    William Mott, a retired Navy rear admiral who is acting president of
the Washington-based National Legal Center for the Public Interest,
said: ''There's a quiet majority in this country that is tired of
bureaucrats. We're trying to restore representation of the people.''
    Daniel Popeo, general counsel of the Washington foundation, said:
''Businessmen have to be radicals now, because they're the
outsiders.''
    
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