In the Public Interest

A group of spirited employees at the American Safety Razor Company (ASR) plant in Staunton, Va., are honing a political action strategy against the Federal Trade Commission. At issue are hun­dreds of jobs and the kind of antitrust dilemma that most government lawyers would rather not have to resolve. Here are the facts at their…

Four young reporters from the Children’s Express recently interviewed me. They ranged in age from 10 to 13 years and asked very though-provoking questions on consumer and environmental subjects. Children’s Express is a new monthly magazine written by children. Americans first heard of this delightful idea at the Democratic National Convention last July. The children…

Few situations are more pleasant to follow than a determined businessman on a public interest crusade. One such advocate is William N. Plymat, a co-founder and just retired Chairman of the Board of the Preferred Risk Mutual Insurance Company. From his offices in Des Moines, Iowa, Plymat is accelerating his long fight against al­coholism by…

An American Bar Association Commit­tee has completed a report for the Justice Department on economic or business crimes that is sure to focus more top-level attention on tax enforcement efforts regarding these offenses. Already, sig­nals from the Carter White House and from Attorney General Griffin Bell fore­shadow a move to expand the federal government’s resources…

How many times have you heard it said that this nation has no compre­hensive energy policy? Probably al­most as often as you have heard Jimmy Carter and other political fig­ures promise to give you one. Well, it is important in this harsh winter of the energy industry’s con­tent to summarize what has been learned, if…

About 12 years ago a 9-year-old girl was rid­ing her bicycle near her suburban home out­side of Washington when she struck the rear bumper of a parked automobile. The collision hurled her flush into the sharp, protruding tail-fin on the car. She was fatally impaled. Such tragedies are not freak accidents. Hun­dreds of thousands of…

A few months before the Congressional elections of 1816, the members of Congress voted them­selves a pay increase. The public outrage was jolting. Thomas Jef­ferson wrote: “There has never been an instance before of so unanimous an opinion of the people.” Even though the Congress quickly repealed the compensation law before election day, almost two-thirds…

If the lessons of recent Washington history are to be heeded, Jimmy Carter should be launching a “two track presi­dency” to fulfill his campaign declara­tions. The first track is the familiar one. It involves treating the problems of inflation, unemployment, disease, poverty and crime on the domestic scene and the urgency of the arms race,…

Utilities, polluters, other corporate defrauders and wayward government agencies may not be pleased, but here is a bit of good news on the hori­zon for the people. The fraternity of lawyers known as the “organized bar” is finally beginning to con­sider seriously its obligations to support what has come to be known as public interest…

The other day I came across a unique report from U.S. District Judge Charles B. Renfrew in San Francisco. It exam­ines the sentences he imposed on several corporate executives in a criminal anti­trust case. Judges rarely follow up their sentencing decisions and even more rarely write an evaluation of them after they are carried out.…