# Pacific Legal Foundation The first conservative public-interest law firm (Sacramento, 1973), founded by members of Governor [[Ronald Reagan]]'s staff to do for property rights and deregulation what the ACLU and the NAACP Legal Defense Fund had done for civil liberties — pick the case, find the sympathetic plaintiff, litigate it to the Supreme Court. The model was copied across the movement (the [[Federalist Society]] supplied the lawyers; the Institute for Justice, the Alliance Defending Freedom and the rest of the [[Conservative Legal Movement]] the specializations), and PLF remains its most successful practitioner at the Court: eighteen Supreme Court victories by its own count, a record it describes as "on par with the ACLU." ## What it wins The docket is takings, wetlands, and race. *Nollan v. California Coastal Commission* (1987) established that a permit condition must have an "essential nexus" to its purpose; *Sackett v. EPA* (2023, 9–0) cut the Clean Water Act's reach to wetlands with a continuous surface connection to navigable water, removing federal jurisdiction from roughly half the country's wetlands; *Tyler v. Hennepin County* (2023, unanimous) held that a county cannot keep the surplus when it sells a home for tax debt; *Sheetz v. El Dorado County* (2024, unanimous) extended the exactions doctrine to legislative impact fees; *Cedar Point Nursery v. Hassid* (2021) made a union's regulatory right to enter farm property a per se taking. On race, PLF represented the challengers to race-conscious school assignment in *Parents Involved* (2007) and has litigated against [[Affirmative Action]] and against race-based government programs continuously since — the line that runs to [[Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard]]. ## Why it matters here PLF is the template for the litigation strategy that the rest of the vault's legal pages describe: it does not lobby, it sues, and it chooses cases whose facts make the doctrine look like common sense (a family denied a permit to build on a lot; a widow whose home was sold for a $15,000 tax bill and who got nothing back). The unanimous decisions are the point — the strategy is to win the liberal Justices, not to outvote them. Its funding is the standard conservative-foundation base ([[Bradley Foundation]], [[Sarah Scaife Foundation]], Koch-network donors); its current program adds separation-of-powers cases against the [[Administrative State]] — nondelegation, removal, agency adjudication — that make it a participant in the [[Unitary Executive Theory]] litigation as well as the property one. ## See Also - [[Federalist Society]] · [[Conservative Legal Movement]] · [[Affirmative Action]] · [[Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard]] - [[Administrative State]] · [[Unitary Executive Theory]] · [[Ronald Reagan]] · [[Bradley Foundation]] · [[Sarah Scaife Foundation]]