In Public Citizens, Paul Sabin offers a history of the “public interest movement”; that is, the 1960s- and 1970s-era efforts of Ralph Nader and others to push the federal government to act on behalf of the public interest. The elite lawyers leading this movement trained their critique on the federal administrative agencies that, they argued, mostly protected the interests of the businesses they regulated and took forever to act. Although this critique was already well developed in legal circles, Nader and his colleagues popularized it by launching investigations of individual agencies, industries, and Congress, and widely publicizing the examples of inaction and conflicts of interest that they found. They argued that these failures of the administrative process demonstrated the limits of the New Deal order underlying postwar liberalism, specifically “the productive partnership between government, business, and labor established during the 1930s” (3). To extend the protections of federal governance to those outside this arrangement, reformers sought to make government more efficient and transparent, more inclusive of diverse voices in the administrative process, and more receptive to environmental and consumer-oriented views of the “public interest.”

Much as the Progressives had built administrative agencies decades earlier to limit the excesses of democracy and corporate power, public interest advocates created their own institutional checks on government action. Sabin notes that political historians have paid insufficient attention to this particular set of organizations and to their concerns about postwar liberalism. Nader-created organizations (like Public Citizen and the Center for Study of Responsive Law) and environmental law firms (like the National Resources Defense Council and the Environmental Defense Fund) were positioned outside the government, funded through private grants, and wholly focused on pushing the government to do better. As Sabin makes clear, this new nonprofit sector, largely staffed by white male lawyers and law students, hardly posed a radical change to the methods of American governance. Instead, he notes, through lobbying, administrative intervention, and federal litigation, “liberal public interest organizations sought to change the system from within” (56).

The book is most persuasive in its discussion of how public interest reformers “made the nonprofit sector and issue-based advocacy a potent force in US politics” (162). Their optimistic approach had some marked successes, at least on paper. Congress passed consumer safety and environmental laws with extremely specific requirements meant to force agency action. The Clean Air Act of 1970, for example, was based in “a profound and pervasive distrust of government even as it expanded federal regulatory powers” (82). And, pressed by public interest lawyers, federal courts granted parties permission to intervene in the administrative process to raise environmental issues, and to challenge administrative decisions that had failed to consider consumers and the environment as part of the public interest. (Left unexplored, however, is whether reformers were correct in their diagnosis of administrative ills, or whether bringing these public interest arguments into the administrative process had the desired effect.)

Sabin urges readers to consider the public interest movement's successful redefinition of the public interest not as a triumph of big government but rather as a reflection of its failures, framed as it was around the assumptions that bureaucrats could not be trusted. Liberal reformers’ critique of big government shook Americans’ confidence in government's ability to solve social problems. Sabin argues that this critique from the left, joined with the long-term critique of government planning from the right, weakened the foundation of the New Deal order. If even liberal lawyers wouldn't defend the federal government's ability to solve social problems, who would?

Implicit in the book is how limited reformers’ own view of the “public interest” was. While these liberal lawyers demanded government pay attention to environmental and consumer issues, Sabin points out their lack of interest in the race and gender anti-discrimination efforts happening around them (evident both in their hiring practices and their intellectual focus). At the same time, he suggests that the liberal lawyers’ critique was influenced by the civil rights and antiwar movements, both of which “exposed how the traditional establishment could entrench power in unaccountable government institutions that would use lies, violence, and other tactics to retain control and pursue their objectives” (56). More granular discussion of how the public interest movement drew on the legal and institutional tactics of the civil rights movement, and on the opportunities that legal liberalism provided, would have been valuable for legal historians. But also, given how many people were aggressively questioning the state from left, right, and center, the relative significance of this lawyerly critique of the administrative process remains unclear. While the bounds of the broader public interest movement are left opaque, the book's focus on Nader does offer a useful path through a complicated story.