Not Old School

Voucher Wars: Waging the Legal Battle over School Choice, by Clint Bolick (Cato, 277 pp., $12)

When Clint Bolick learned that Wisconsin had enacted America's first true school-choice program, he called the legislation's sponsor, state representative Polly Williams, to offer his congratulations. Then he asked if she was ready for the lawsuit. "What lawsuit?" replied Williams.

That was in 1990. Over the next twelve years, lawsuits in Wisconsin and elsewhere would make up the better part of Bolick's life. Defending school-choice programs against teachers unions and their aggressive litigation became a passion for Bolick and a few other energetic lawyers who congregated around the Institute for Justice, a libertarian public-interest law firm. Their hard work finally paid off last summer, when the Supreme Court issued a sweeping endorsement of school choice's constitutionality. Voucher Wars is an engaging memoir of this remarkable legal achievement.

The story begins with Bolick revealing his libertarian idealism. At Drew University, he enrolled in a teacher-certification program and, as a part of his student teaching, tried to replace a "boring" world- history textbook with Ayn Rand's We the Living. In law school at UC- Davis, he skipped the graduation ceremony because the commencement speaker was Ralph Nader. Next, in the early 1980s, he began a career in Nader's field, public-interest law. Bolick describes why non-profit legal work appealed to a young right-winger like himself: "You get to choose your cases and your clients, you don't have to charge anything, and, in our case, you get to sue bureaucrats."

In contrast with the Institute's other activities, most of Bolick's work on school choice didn't bring with it the joy of suing bureaucrats. Instead, it called for defending programs in Milwaukee, Cleveland, and Florida from attacks by determined teachers unions. "In public policy," he explains, "no good deed goes unchallenged in court."

As he defended school choice, however, Bolick knew that he was really on offense, against "one of the biggest and most pernicious government monopolies in the free world." The education establishment will marshal all its resources to defeat school-choice plans that give parents the financial means to enroll their children in private schools, rather than failing public ones. When a program springs up -- even if it limits the number of participants to a handful of kids from low-income families -- the teachers unions will spend millions to smack it down.

Only lawyers will love certain sections of Voucher Wars, such as the passage in which Bolick lays out an interpretation of res judicata doctrine. The chronological narration also requires constant scene- shifting, and sometimes it's hard to keep track of exactly whose appeal is being heard where. Yet Bolick keeps pushing his story along, often with dashes of humor. One of his early adversaries was Wisconsin's superintendent of public instruction, a fellow named Bert Grover. "Despite having two Sesame Street names, Grover was no friend of children," deadpans the author. At another point, he comments that the Institute for Justice's home office is "a stone's throw from the White House -- a distance I like to say I personally measured during the Clinton years."

There are some harrowing moments in the book, too. On April 29, 1992, Bolick was in South Central Los Angeles organizing black parents in behalf of school choice: "We learned that a jury had just acquitted the police officers who had savagely beaten Rodney King, and we wondered whether there would be trouble." He didn't wonder for long. As he drove to a meeting, rioters hurled rocks at his car and one man charged at him with a two-by-four. Bolick had to pull into oncoming traffic and run a red light to escape. He wound up watching Reginald Denny's beating on live television, only two intersections from where it was happening.

Voucher Wars always returns to courtroom action, and here Bolick shows what every lawyer must know: Sometimes the deck is so stacked, it doesn't matter how strong your arguments are. When the teachers union sued Florida's school-choice program, for instance, it hired a "back- country, good ol' boy" attorney named Dexter Douglass -- who emerged directly from the judge's chambers to take his seat at the plaintiffs' counsel table before the case's first preliminary hearing.

The judge in question, one L. Ralph "Bubba" Smith, was hostile from the start. Bolick later learned that Smith's son was engaged to the daughter of a top union official, so he filed a recusal motion. The couple replied with affidavits denying that they had ever been engaged, and Bolick withdrew his request "with embarrassment." Smith struck down the program, "issuing verbatim the lengthy opinion drafted by the teachers union." A little while later, Smith's lovebirds really did get hitched. School choice ultimately would prevail in Florida after further wrangling -- but not in the courtroom of Judge Bubba, who was tossed off the case when it went back to trial.