Key Legal Victory

Until recently, the U.S. landscape could be blighted by huge construction projects, especially highways, and almost nothing could be done to stop the despoliation. Now a new court decision proves that an organization of private citizens can sue to halt even the mightiest road builders--and win.

In New York last year state and fed eral engineers announced plans to put a six-lane highway along the Hudson River between Tarrytown and Crotonville. David Sive and Alfred S. Forsyth, New York environmental lawyers, duly went to work for a coalition including the Sierra Club and the Citizens Committee for the Hudson Valley. In a federal district court, Sive argued that drawings prepared by the Army Corps of Engineers depicted a large dike, extending 1,000 feet into the river, and a causeway. He then cited an 1899 federal law that forbids building dikes and causeways "over or in" navigable waterways unless Congress first authorizes the project and the Secretary of Transportation approves. No such approval for the New York road had been granted.

Standard of Sincerity. Well and good--but courts generally refuse to hear litigants who have no "standing," meaning a personal stake in the outcome. Sive's clients seemingly lacked that requisite. Even so, he had the answer: his own victory in the 1965 court decision to stop construction of a big Consolidated Edison plant at Storm King Mountain near the Hudson. In that pioneering case, conservationists won the right to represent the public as "aggrieved parties" to protect the environment.

The federal district court blocked the New York road; the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit has just upheld that decision. Speaking for the court, Judge Leonard Moore stressed the new right of citizens' groups to defend "natural resources, scenic beauty and historical value" of areas threatened with drastic alteration. Such groups, he added, can prove their sincerity by taking on "the burdensome and costly processes of intervention."

Later decisions by the courts will probably refine that standard. Nonetheless, Moore's opinion may well serve as a precedent for stopping other controversial public works projects that involve dikes--for example, an airport extension into the Columbia River at Portland, Ore. Even more important, says Lawyer Sive, "the public interest in environmental resources is now a legally protected interest."

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