Only a few years ago prospects for the Sacramento-based Pacific Legal Foundation, the country’s oldest “conservative” public interest law firm, hardly seemed promising. In 1986, PLF president and CEO Ronald Zumbrun decided to indulge in deficit spending to continue unpopular land use and takings litigation. The legacy of judicial activism from the 1960’s and 70’s was also hardly conducive to staff morale, recalls Zumbrun: “Our biggest problem over the years had been that the courts had presumed government was always correct.”

That was, he says, “until Nollan.” Nollan v. California Coastal Commission, one of the cases for which Zumbrun leveraged $300,000 in 1986, went in 1987 to the United States Supreme Court, which agreed with PLF that government agencies could not demand property as a condition for issuing permits. “Any time you lose in the Supreme Court, it is significant,” says Ralph Faust, the commission’s chief counsel, of the case. “It changed the way we do business.”

Others, noting PLF’s partisan ties, say the firm was simply in the right place at the right time. “The commission’s leaning toward granting permits isn’t so much because of Nollan, but because of [Republican Governors] Deukmejian and Wilson” providing conservative appointees, says Oakland sole practitioner Joe Brecher, who works on retainer for the Sierra Club Legal Defense Fund, a longtime PLF opponent. But a win means precedent. And as Faust says, the case “raised a lot of money.”

PLF’s budget today stands at about $4 million, twice what it was in 1986 and a quantum leap from the $110,000 Zumbrun launched the firm with in 1973. And now, coupled with precedents from Nollan and its 1992 sister case, Lucas v. South Carolina Coastal Council, PLF hopes a blitz of amicus filing against wetlands and endangered species regulations will stake out new legal territory for the property rights movement.

The opening shot came in August 1993, in Sierra Club v. Kern County, which is still waiting to be heard. PLF sided with the county when the Sierra Club sought to prevent the state Fish and Game Commission from dropping the Mojave Ground Squirrel from its threatened species list. The proposed “delisting,” the first of its kind in the state since the Endangered Species Act of 1973, would open up considerable acreage in Kern County for development.

“Wetlands and endangered species regulations, although they have been around for years, have not been developed in their full regulatory glory,” explains PLF trustee Thomas May, a partner in the San Diego firm of Luce, Forward, Hamilton & Scripps. “Every time you see a new regulatory wave, there are more and more property rights activists.” In other words, more potential clients and donors, which is a boon to the property rights movement but which leads opponents to counter that PLF’s amicus strategy is just marketing fodder for business interests, which will amount to little in court if resources and talent are not focused. “The extent of their impact has been difficult to tell because they have been involved in so many cases indirectly,” says Joel Reynolds, senior attorney in the Los Angeles office of the National Resources Defense Council.

And not just involved in land use cases. PLF has fought for term limits and against affirmative action, rent controls, gays in the military, and state university and bar fees directed to political activities. William Rusher, the retired publisher of National Review and a PLF trustee, recalls, “We recently represented a high school student who wanted to set up a Rush Limbaugh Club at school.” The matter was quickly resolved. After a visit by PLF attorneys to the governing board of Alcalanes Union High School in Orinda, California, student Kurt Busboom won permission to set up the club on campus.

But it is land use that pays PLF’s bills. And with more and more regulations on private property, PLF, says May, will no longer be dismissed as a tool of “rapacious developers.” With $4 million in the bank, PLF will surely be able to continue its work. An image makeover is much more problematic. Even so, PLF has come far since the dark days before Nollan. “We have the experience, the legal precedent weapons, and the courts are listening to us,” says Zumbrun. “We can do more in the next 20 years than we did in the past 20 years because we have a base and a springboard.”

Indeed, the property rights movement gained important ground last June when the United States Supreme Court ruled in its favor in a crucial land use and property rights case in which PLF was named as a friend of the court. In a 5 to 4 decision, the Court in Dolan v. City of Tigard placed new limits on the ability of governments to require developers to set aside property for environmental uses. Writing for the majority. Chief Justice Rehnquist said, “We see no reason why the takings clause of the Fifth Amendment, as much a part of the Bill of Rights as the First Amendment, should be relegated to the status of a poor relation.”

Turnabout is fair play, and the official reaction of attorneys in environmental groups echoed the dejection at PLF circa 1986. John Echeverria, general counsel of the Audubon Society, called the ruling “an extraordinary intrusion by the court into the authority of local government. It elevates the interest of property owners over the interest of the community as a whole.”