Little Pink House_ A True Story of Defiance and Courage - Jeff Benedict [70]
Three hours later, Kreckovic finished and took the letter to the post office.
Late May 2000
As soon as he had passed the bar exam in Pennsylvania, Scott Bullock had headed to Washington, D.C., in the summer of 1991, to take a job at a start-up legal organization. Bullock’s mind had been set on changing the way large masses of people think. He had considered becoming an economist or philosopher, but that, he figured, would limit him to merely speaking and writing. He had something a little more action oriented in mind: using the Constitution as an instrument to alter how others act.
Attorney and entrepreneur Chip Mellor had just founded the Institute for Justice with civil-rights attorney Clint Bolick. Before launching the institute, Mellor had spent five years developing litigation blueprints and strategies for the Pacific Research Institute in San Francisco, where he had become friendly with Milton Friedman. At Pacific, Mellor focused his legal research on property rights, economic liberty, free speech, and school choice. He designed the Institute for Justice to focus primarily on those four issues.
Scott Bullock didn’t know Chip Mellor then. But, as a law student, Bullock had interned for Clint Bolick at the Landmark Center for Civil Rights. Bullock jumped at the chance to rejoin Bolick and work alongside Mellor as the third attorney in a nonprofit law practice dedicated to protecting people’s rights. It fit his personal philosophy, which was that people ought to be free to do as they wished unless they were harming someone else.
Bullock’s view of the world was formed early. Born in Guantánamo Bay, where his father served in the navy shortly after the Cuban missile crisis, Bullock got an early education in personal liberties and what happens when governments suppress them. After his father retired, Bullock moved with his parents and brother back to Pittsburgh, where his larger family had lived for generations. Unlike many Washington lawyers, Bullock didn’t come from a high-powered background. He was the first in his family to graduate from college. Most of his relatives worked in Pittsburgh factories. His brother was a mechanic.
But Bullock was influenced early on by the writings of Thomas Paine, Thomas Jefferson, and Milton Friedman, especially Friedman’s book Free to Choose. At the institute, Bullock started representing private-property owners facing eminent-domain takings by local and state governments. Private law firms thought the institute was wasting its time on eminent-domain cases, taking the view that virtually anything goes when it comes to government taking private property for public use. The institute was determined to change that.
Single, with short hair, wire-rimmed glasses, and a baby face, Bullock sat down at his desk in the firm’s Pennsylvania Avenue office in late May 2000 to go through his mail. Facing an etching of Thomas Paine and a picture of jazz musician John Coltrane, he discovered a letter postmarked New London, Connecticut.
Bullock and his partners routinely received letters from strangers around the country seeking help. In any given week, a dozen letters or more might arrive. Few ever got beyond a quick read by Bullock, because most of the letters raised legal questions not suitable for the institute’s intervention.
Bullock opened the letter from New London. “Many homeowners in the neighborhood have already sold, unable to deal with the uncertainty in their lives of losing their homes,” he read. “But there are some twenty families as well as a number of businesses that are holding out and who are faced with eminent domain.”
The story sounded very familiar. Bullock read on. “Many families face considerable financial and emotional damage if eminent domain is used—basically to demolish a working class neighborhood to build more expensive housing,” the letter said. “Some of these people have lived in these houses all their lives, and are elderly. Some are in their nineties.”