Endorsements for “Inside the Equal Access to Justice Act”

Lowell Baier has been a lifelong champion for conservation, carrying on the legacy of President Theodore Roosevelt. This book on America’s lands litigation is a must read for all who care about the conservation of our wonderful national crown jewels.

We have here a book of truth and power. Lowell E. Baier, in his thoughtful and powerful publication shows our history ­­– first of abuse and more recently of our collaborative efforts to protect this magnificent country and world.

This masterful work of scholarship flawlessly proves that today’s new paradigm of cooperative conservation and federalism in endangered species conservation is a far more responsible endeavor with measurable results than can ever be achieved by combative saturation litigation and court intervention.

Inside the Equal Access to Justice Act is an important history of how American land conservation battles have played out in courts. All environmentalists should read this well-written book. Highly recommended!

With more than 1,100 species currently under court-ordered consideration for listing under the Endangered Species Act, Lowell Baier’s powerful research forces all conservationists to question the efficacy of the current system and whether a more scientific and collaborative approach would produce better results for wildlife in the 21st century.

Minutely and extraordinarily researched, masterfully written in a voice that rings with authority from a tremendous depth of knowledge, it will transform your view of environmental litigation, and its politics and players.

This book is the story of how decades of aggressive environmental litigation have eroded the core missions, expertise and effectiveness of America’s land, wildlife and water management agencies. It poses the serious question of how the public land mass, comprising one-third of the United States, can be effectively managed in the 21st century, and the consequences the remaining two-thirds will suffer from unchecked litigation.

Baier has produced an intellectual tour de force with the publication of Inside the Equal Access to Justice Act. The focus of this book is the need to reform the Equal Access to Justice Act (EAJA) because of unintended provisions that incentivize and reward environmental litigants for filing suit against federal regulatory and land management agencies, and consequentially hinder proactive cooperative efforts… Baier, a seasoned lawyer, political scientist, historian, and one of America’s leading conservationists, peels back layers of proverbial onion to reconstruct a fascinating story about how this law came into existence and the twist of fate that led to a seemingly minor provision being inserted that eventually opened the floodgates of environmental litigation.

In his insightful book, Inside the Equal Access to Justice Act, Lowell Baier looks beyond these substantive statutes to the little-known role that the Equal Access to Justice Act (EAJA) plays in funding the legal fees of the environmental groups that bring these lawsuits. Expansively tracing the history of the EAJA and its role in the contemporary environmental movement, Baier explores how the intricacies of the legislative process can have far-reaching effects on the development of the law. In addition to assailing the inefficiencies of environmental litigation and its distortion of administrative processes and policies, Baier paints a way forward to better serve public lands policy by amending the EAJA to ease the litigation burden on agencies as they attempt to give life to the policy goals expressed by Congress. Drawing on decades of experience as a litigator and his passion for old-school wildlife conservation, Baier’s critical eye charts a provocative, if measured, path forward for environmental administration.

Historians and other scholars of U.S. environmental politics will find a scrupulously narrated account of the political milieu from which this legislation emerged, along with its evolution over recent decades, in the book’s first four chapters. Assembled from an impressive array of interview notes and archival texts, these accessible chapters detail the original objectives for and later impacts of this important statute… Baier’s detailed policy history of the EAJA should be of interest to scholarly and lay readers alike.