As did the professionals who had just put a man on the moon a few months earlier, the attorneys who founded the Environmental Law Reporter approached their efforts with creativity, energy, and the will to get things done. In those days, type had to be painstakingly set in hot metal, cases and materials were only available in physical form, and photocopiers were rare. The service eventually expanded to more than half a dozen red binders, which became the effective logo of ELR for decades.

While ELR enters its 50th volume year in January, the wall of binders is now a thing of the past. All 50 years of the service is offered online — more than 13,000 cases, 2,900 articles, and 5,000 guidance and policy documents, to name just a few of the items in ELR’s massive collection.

When the first issue hit the streets, the National Environmental Policy Act was an infant and the Environmental Protection Agency had just been created the previous month. The alphabet of environmental acronyms we think of today — CWA, CAA, CERCLA, ESA, RCRA — unfolded only later, during the 1970s and 1980s. Thanks to the foresight of ELI’s founders, the predecessors of today’s ELR editorial staff were there from the very beginning, witnessing and reporting on an entirely new field of law. And it worked, too, with ELR’s early successes providing ELI the resources to become the research and educational powerhouse of today.

As the needs of the environmental bar increased, the staff of ELR soon found themselves in the book publishing business, releasing “deskbooks” on a variety of statutes — huge, comprehensive volumes that became a must-have for practicing environmental attorneys then and now. Other titles focused on practical and cutting-edge issues alike. Now publishing books under the ELI Press imprint, ELR staff continue that work today.

Even as some of what we now consider the traditional environmental laws became more settled in the late 1990s and early 2000s, ELR continued to educate the bar while providing a space for environmental professionals to share new ideas and approaches to environmental law, policy, and regulation via the monthly News & Analysis legal journal.

There has never been a shortage of topics to cover and uncover, be they proposals for addressing climate change, the pros and cons of market-based tools, implications of agricultural biotechnology, or legal impediments to raising backyard chickens.

As the internet caused many publications to rethink and reshape their organizational structures, if not close up shop, times became tough for ELR as well. The publication transitioned from the red binders only in stages, first through the Lexis and Westlaw services, later in a CD-ROM edition, and only then onto the web. Maintaining a subscriber base was, is, and will always be a challenge for a niche publication like ELR, a service that was considered to be fundamental to the viability of environmental law at the time of the Institute’s founding — and it is still filling that role today. But the menu of options provided has changed considerably over the last half century.

And of course you are holding in your hands a copy of The Environmental Forum, whose 40th anniversary is coming soon. TEF is the magazine for professionals in all aspects of law, policy, and management in the environmental sphere, including not only attorneys but scientists, engineers, economists, and a bunch of other specialties in its broad ambit.

TEF was founded by respected journalist Bud Ward, a groundbreaker in covering environmental news. He edited the publication for its first four years, when it was in a monthly subscription format. Today, it is the bimonthly membership magazine of the ELI Associates Programs, which draw together the entire environmental profession.

Since Ward’s day, TEF has continued to keep professionals abreast of the cutting-edge issues of tomorrow, filling his vision of a magazine that would be read by decisionmakers in Washington and statehouses around the nation as well as members of the business community and the environmental bar.

Fifty years out it is fair to ask how ELI happened to be formed around a publishing project that was, on first look, just a new and more ambitious type of clearinghouse for legal information, an existing format for other law specialties. To answer this from one founder’s perspective, it helps to go back to the intense times of the 1960s and the influence of the civil rights and anti-war movements on the career choices of younger lawyers.

After early work on House and Senate staffs I was involved, often as counsel, in several civil rights, anti-poverty, and anti-war initiatives. The striking silence of the organized bar on war issues eventually prompted me to focus on the military draft as law-deficient, often arbitrary, and sorely needing bar involvement. To address this, I drafted a prospectus for a Selective Service Law Reporter and engaged several colleagues to join in forming the Public Law Education Institute in 1967 to publish it. I found enthusiastic support among smaller foundations, and we recruited a dedicated staff with the aim of creating a new field, served by informed, motivated lawyers. Largely due to the great skill of the first editor-in-chief, and our ambitious aim to create this field, the Reporter achieved its objective and became both a living legend and a template for later PLEI projects. I was the PLEI president, which was the background and foundation from which I undertook the Environmental Law Reporter project two years later.

My basic premise was that a well-done and ambitious publication could convert a conventionally passive format into a vehicle for defining a field and educating a practicing bar. Second, that a wholly professional publication was possible with a small production staff and limited budget. Third, that a credible business plan could be based on a commitment to limited and declining reliance on donor or foundation funding. Finally, I believed that editorial excellence could induce even the defensive bar to subscribe to the service as a matter of prudence.

At this time, “environmental law” was essentially an aspirational concept intended to bind an aggregate of recognized legal regimes and common-law principles and remedies. One seeing it as a legal field of practice would have to consider the different realms — diverse statutory systems, tort claims, property rights, common-law constraints of public and private activity — as well as fundamental issues like justiciability and standing. The Reporter I hoped to found would attempt to reach and possibly integrate all of these.

Another motivation was the profusion of new citizen-based cases challenging decisions and practices by governmental or corporate actors. These were civil actions which would be finally decided long after the basic theory had been laid out in the pleadings and briefs. Plaintiffs’ filings were frequently innovative, with potentially great time value for other litigants. To distribute them beyond those immediately concerned would require a service that collected the court filings, described them in detail, and made them widely available as photocopies. To appreciate the value of something this simple, not only was the internet well in the future at the time, so too was the wide availability of high volume copying machines.

At a more personal level, I had become aware of the group of recent Yale graduates who were forming what would be the Natural Resources Defense Council. Their energy and commitment clearly foreshadowed a developing legal movement that I felt drawn to and wanted to support.

I realized that to do this well I needed to link PLEI with an organization already in the field. I conveyed this to Charles Halpern, an attorney with prodigious networking skills who had been on the original PLEI board. Charlie had earlier mentioned my Reporter proposal to Malcolm Baldwin, the staff legal associate of the Conservation Foundation, and found him very interested. I asked Charlie if he would arrange a luncheon meeting, which he did in mid July 1969. That meeting was, in retrospect, a major turning point in ELI’s history.

One of those at the meeting was James Moorman, who had earlier left a Wall Street firm for a position in the Justice Department Lands Division (which he would eventually head as assistant attorney general). Jim had joined with Charlie to form a new law center. His solid grounding and strategic grasp of federal environment law was an especially strong element in that center’s funding proposal. From the outset Jim became one of the active founders of ELI.

At the time of the meeting, Malcolm was in the midst of planning a conference on environmental law to be held in the fall under CF auspices at Airlie House, a country estate 50 miles from Washington, recently refitted as a conference retreat. Malcolm’s plan was to draw together a nationwide group of 40 academics and practicing lawyers for a two-day event that September. There were to be four plenary sessions with no breakout groups, and the last session was to close the conference with the adoption of concrete recommendations. Interest in the conference was spreading, leading Malcolm to eventually expand the list of invitees to nearly 70.

At our mid-July meeting, Malcolm and I had quickly agreed that a fitting capstone for the conference would be a statement of support for ELR as the binding force for the emerging legal movement. With only 60 days remaining until the conference, I drafted a bare-bones prospectus for the Reporter. To give it more specific environmental substance, we were able to engage Bill Iverson, a recent editor-in-chief of the Yale Law Journal. Bill, who had ties to the NRDC group, agreed to dedicate August to the project. I was able to raise one-half his salary from a small foundation, which CF matched, while also offering library support. Given the short time allowed, Bill’s draft was a resourceful canvassing of existing publications and a statement of the case for ELR as stimulus to the development of an environmental bar.

To review the work, we created a committee composed of Malcolm, Jim, myself, and Michael Schneiderman, an interested practitioner. This gave us a framework to bring in members of the NRDC group for two editorial review sessions in August. Our review had two goals: improving the draft and, importantly, signaling to foundations that ELR and NRDC were being conceived of by their founders as mutually reinforcing and that neither would be a redundant use of foundation support. We held to our goal of finishing the prospectus in August, then mailed it to the Airlie House invitees during the first week of September.

The Airlie House conference has become a legendary moment. In large measure, this reflects Malcolm’s selection of invitees, topics — and panelists. Many of the attendees would be leaders in environmental law development during the 1970s, as litigators, educators, or public interest law directors. For most, the conference was the first on a nationwide scale at which environment law was the frame of reference. In the end, the spirit of the event was as much a convocation of founding fathers as it was an educational enterprise.

In the three programmed sessions, the focus was on litigation. The first, chaired by Joseph Sax, keyed on a discussion of evidentiary issues posed in a conference paper by David Sive. This was structured as a case study of the Santa Barbara oil spill earlier that year. The second session was a conceptually ambitious sequence of six presentations ranging from standing to the prospect of recognizing an environmental right analogous to a property right. The third session keyed on three papers on fundamentals of legal education and practice.

The fourth and final session concluded the gathering by adopting recommendations from the conferees, principally to endorse the founding of the Environmental Law Reporter. The endorsement was made with genuine enthusiasm.

With the conference over, I suggested that we aim our organization and funding efforts toward the ambitious goal of publishing ELR for an initial volume year to begin in 1970. This brought Sydney Howe into the project. As CF’s new president, he would be an essential and active partner. We formed a legal joint venture between PLEI and CF to launch ELI and maintain mutual control for three years. This was accomplished by giving PLEI and CF equal numbers of seats on the initial board. I committed to serving as the half-time president until 1973, which would give us continuity in staffing up and publishing at least two volume years of ELR. ELI offices were co-located with PLEI, an arrangement that continued for 15 years.

CF, through Malcolm and Syd, was a fully engaged partner, providing leads to staff candidates and redirecting some general support to ELI while a multi-year Ford Foundation grant was pending. CF’s most enduring contribution was to add Craig Mathews to the initial board. Craig, a D.C. attorney who had proceeded me at Yale, was a great stabilizing influence in our early years. He followed me as part-time president for two years when I stepped aside in 1973 to spend the next 12 years on the executive committee and board. Craig remained for years later, becoming ELI’s longest serving director.

I filed incorporation papers just before Christmas 1969 — felicitously on the day that NEPA was enacted — turning then to long-term funding and finding and enlisting ELR’s first editor-in-chief. To the latter end, I sought out a number of promising candidates from law faculties and private practice, but none could take the job in the time window we had set. Walking away from a meeting at this juncture, I casually suggested to Jim Moorman that this search had become discouraging. Jim replied memorably: “If you don’t do it, it won’t happen.” As I recall, there was a brief pause, and then: “I have a friend from high school days who is here in Washington and is looking for a new job. He might be a good candidate. His name is Fred Anderson.” In retrospect, that exchange with Jim was the most significant moment up to that date in the shaping of both ELR and the Institute as we know them today.

I met with Fred and took stock of two published articles he presented as writing samples. These were accomplished, well-written pieces, closely attuned to two quite different audiences. I offered him the editorship, with the uniform support of other board members who then met him. Before he could arrive, we continued to staff up and issue ELI’s first publication, the Environmental Law Digest, a survey of 50 pending cases I had designed as a place-holder for ELR and a model for its treatment of litigation documents,

Fred came on later in 1970 and, in the following year securely established the Reporter as everything that was expected of it and more. Although ELR remained the mother ship, Fred began to expand ELI’s program to include research projects undertaken with partners and those conducted independently by the Institute’s growing professional staff. In tandem with this, ELI expanded its involvement in conference planning and education.

In mid-1972, Fred was given the role of executive director to allow him more responsibility for ELI development. When Craig stepped down as president in 1975 Fred succeeded him to become ELI’s first full-time leader. He left for a Utah academic position in 1980, but his enduring legacy was a highly regarded Institute, poised to scale upward and outward. How this happened is the longer story of the 40 years that followed. TEF