Public Interest Groups, Public Law Litigation, and Federal Rule 24(a)

The Supreme Court's decision in Brown v Board of Education' stands as a benchmark in two great revolutions.The first was social: the forced integration of schoolchildren played a key role in the struggle for racial equality.The second was judicial.In Brown, the Supreme Court "committed the federal courts to an enterprise of profound social reconstruction.' 2 Other forms of nontraditional litigation soon followed, such as challenges to legislative districting, suits assailing practices of mental hospitals and police departments, environmental enforcement actions, and constitutional attacks on government expenditures and statutes. 3 In his seminal article, Professor Abram Chayes identified these cases with the emergence of a new model of litigatipn: "public law litigation."' 4 He contrasts traditional litigation, which he characterizes as a mode of settling private disputes, with public law litigation, which instead centers on a "grievance about the content or conduct of policy-most often governmental policy, but frequently the policy of nongovernmental aggregates."'5 Public law cases usually set out "to vindicate important social values that affect numerous individuals and entities." 6According to Professor