By Paul Sabin

(Excerpt)

In one early demonstration of these legal superpowers, the Center for Law and Social Policy, a tiny law firm then just a few months old, won a court order in March 1970 that halted construction of the Trans-Alaska Pipeline. “At that moment I was so overcome that all the voices and the scene just faded into the distance,” Moorman, the lead lawyer on the suit, later recalled of this seductive moment when David defeated Goliath. “I’ve never had an experience quite like it. Never have I accomplished anything in the practice of law which has had such an emotional impact on me as that injunction did.” From a dingy office of only a handful of lawyers in Washington’s Dupont Circle, Moorman had helped stop—albeit temporarily—one of the most costly and ambitious engineering projects in U.S history.
 

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