Jefferson Decker's The Other Rights Revolution: Conservative Lawyers and the Remaking of American Government addresses how the conservative movement came to embrace judicial activism and the pursuit of “counter-rights” as a means to challenge and defeat the rights revolution achieved by liberals in the previous decades. Decker shows how ideas and arguments that originated in battles between economic development and environmental policy in the American West eventually took hold at the national level and contributed to a movement dedicated to much more far-reaching changes in United States legal doctrine and regulatory policy. This “other rights revolution” would undo the regulatory state and defend an expansive concept of constitutionally protected economic freedom.

The book focuses primarily on the early 1970s through the mid-1980s, a time of substantial strategic investment by the political right in a “support structure” (see Charles Epp, The Rights Revolution [1988]) for conservative legal advocacy. Drawing on diverse archival materials, Decker offers detailed case studies of several of the most influential conservative public interest law groups founded during the 1970s, including the Pacific Legal Foundation and a few similar regional organizations. He provides the most complete account yet available of the founders of these groups and the lawyers and patrons who supported them, including their motivations, what brought them together, and the challenges they encountered along the way.

Decker emphasizes the origin of many of these conservative public interest firms in the American West, home of most federally owned public land, where tensions between economic and environmental concerns played out most intensely. The founders and patrons of these groups viewed them as necessary to protect orderly government processes against the influence of a new set of powerful (mostly Eastern) liberal elites and the changes they had forged in law, including the expansion of standing, new fee-shifting arrangements, the emergence of class action litigation, and the explosion of federal causes of action.

The lawyers in these organizations initially focused on mobilizing resources “in defense of overwhelmed public officials and a timid private sector,” (2) but as they began to practice their own version of public interest law, their goal shifted from defending public officials and businesses to fighting against the United States regulatory state. They also began to embrace the ideas and accomplishments of the liberal rights revolution, including strategic campaigns to change law through test cases, and judicial activism to overturn precedents that they thought were inconsistent with constitutional guarantees of property rights and limited government. The 1980 election extended the influence of Western conservatives into governance, as lawyers from conservative public interest law firms took positions in the Reagan administration and sought to implement their agenda from within. Decker explores how this led to disagreements among lawyers within the Reagan administration, especially in the Department of Justice, where traditional conservatives who believed in judicial restraint, stable institutions, and precedent tangled with more radical conservatives and libertarians who sought to roll back government and rein in federal power.

Although Decker's assertion that the Western conservatives played pivotal roles in the long-term trajectory of conservative legal activism may slightly overstate their influence relative to other actors, he is right that they contributed substantially to the emergence of a radical and potent brand of conservative advocacy dedicated to challenging government planning and regulation. His book is full of rich details, some of which remind us of the enduring legacy of particular players and events associated with the conservative legal movement's early history. He notes, for example, how Anne Gorsuch, mother of Supreme Court Justice Neil Gorsuch, sought to resist and weaken the authority of the Environmental Protection Agency, first as part of a right-wing faction in the Colorado legislature and then as a Reagan administration appointee; that Joseph Coors bankrolled a television news operation run by Roger Ailes; and that Ronald Reagan promised to abolish the Department of Energy well before Rick Perry and Ted Cruz vowed to do so. Decker also shows how the interests of patrons of the conservative public interest law groups, many of whom were resource extractors, ranchers, and others with business on government lands, helped to change the Republican Party's position on environmentalism. The epilogue also considers the irony that the individual rights strategy that conservatives initially resisted and then repurposed to serve their own objectives has proven to be more effective for conservatives than for liberals, in part because conservatives have succeeded in another aspect of their strategic investments in the years since the period covered by Decker's book: their campaign to change the composition of the Supreme Court to make it more responsive to conservative legal activism and the “other rights revolution.”

Decker's clear and persuasive account of the rise of the conservative legal movement makes a substantial contribution to a growing scholarship on how courts became a favored arena in conservatives’ fight to reshape American law.