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Appalachian Civil Disobedience in Critical Legal Research Modeled Law Reform

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Appalachian Civil Disobedience in Critical Legal Research Modeled Law Reform STUMP Mountain Resistance: Appalachian Civil Disobedience in Critical Legal Research Modeled Law Reform Nicholas F. Stump* John Rawls authored the modern seminal work on civil disobedience in A Theory of Justice. Like all Rawlsian political theory, civil disobedience is very much conceived vis-à-vis the liberalism paradigm. Through this restrictive lens, the role of civil disobedience is in communicating injustices to the societal majority and to legal-institutional elites, who thereafter effect intra-systemic change (i.e., based on the pleas of disobedients). This Article, however, rejects the Rawlsian model, instead adopting a critical legal theory-based approach to civil disobedience. The role of civil disobedience via critical thought is not in communicating to the societal majority—but rather in engaging in collective contestation and self-determination. Thus imbued with contemporary critical theory, civil disobedience is re-envisioned as a grassroots sociopolitical end and not as a mere communicative means towards reform. This Article discusses critically informed civil disobedience in the context of the critical legal research movement (“CLR”). Dedicated equally to intra- systemic and systemic reform, CLR is a proceduralist-based school that aims to effect change via radical approaches to legal research and analysis. Core CLR practices are as follows: (1) the deconstruction of the commercial legal research regime, which facilitates the unpacking of unjust doctrine, (2) a newfound practitioner reliance upon critically based theoretical resources for doctrinal reconstruction, and (3) the incorporation of grassroots activists into progressive reform initiatives. As an expansionist project, this Article examines the role of critically informed civil disobedience in this latter practice, demonstrating that transformative doctrinal and systemic change may best be achieved through the egalitarian cultivation of the civil disobedient work * Library Faculty Member, WVU College of Law. For workshopping of this Article, a heartfelt thanks to the participants of the Eighth Annual Boulder Conference on Legal Information: Scholarship and Teaching, held at the Northwestern Pritzker School of Law, and the Fortieth Annual Appalachian Studies Conference, held at Virginia Tech. A deep thanks also to faculty attendees of the WVU College of Law colloquium on this Article. 67 68 University of California, Davis [Vol. 41:1 product. Civil disobedients—in addition to reformist-minded attorneys, theoreticians, and other grassroots activists—occupy a privileged reform space in this novel framework. In linking theory to concrete reality, Appalachian civil disobedience practices are utilized as the case model for this Article. Civil disobedience is often the sole contestatory means available to the structurally subordinated Appalachian citizenry, which has suffered interminably at the hands of extractive industries and the captured ruling elite. Mountaintop removal mining, a singularly destructive practice, has long been contested by both disobedients and legal-institutional reformers; recently, momentous mountaintop removal change has at last occurred. This Article demonstrates that by incorporating Appalachian civil disobedients into continued surface mining and related reformist projects, we may best succeed in crafting both procedurally just and maximally effective transformative change for the region. Civil disobedience [is] critical legal theory in practice. —Günter Frankenberg1 [C]ivil disobedience exposes the tension between . constitutional politics and insurrectional politics. This tension, however, is at the basis of democracy— and it keeps open the dialectic between these two poles against the claim that it has been successfully resolved and that no further struggles are necessary. —Robin Celikates2 Ollie Combs lived in a small cabin in Clear Creek Valley, Kentucky. when the [strip-mining] operations began, Combs climbed upon the ridge by her house and stood in front of the bulldozers to stop their operations. —Joyce M. Barry on Ollie Combs3 I. INTRODUCTION ................................................................................................ 69 II. CRITICAL LEGAL RESEARCH THEORY ............................................................ 76 A. Deconstruction of American Legal Research Regime ................... 76 1. Critical Legal Theory Foundations .......................................... 77 1 Günter Frankenberg, Disorder is Possible: An Essay on Systems, Laws, and Disobedience, in CULTURAL-POLITICAL INTERVENTIONS IN THE UNFINISHED PROJECT OF ENLIGHTENMENT 30 (Axel Honneth ed., 1992) [hereinafter Frankenberg, Disorder is Possible]. 2 Robin Celikates, Rethinking Civil Disobedience as a Practice of Contestation—Beyond the Liberal Paradigm, 23.1 CONSTELLATIONS 37, 43 (2016) [hereinafter Celikates, Beyond the Liberal Paradigm]. 3 JOYCE. M. BARRY, STANDING OUR GROUND: WOMEN, ENVIRONMENTAL JUSTICE, AND THE FIGHT TO END MOUNTAINTOP REMOVAL 76 (2012) [hereinafter BARRY, STANDING OUR GROUND] (Ollie Combs—widely known as the “The Widow Combs”—was an influential 1960s era Appalachian disobedient). 2017] Appalachian Civil Disobedience in Critical Legal Research 69 2. Homogenization of Research Outcomes in Practice ................ 79 B. Newfound Practitioner Reliance Upon Alternative Resources ...... 83 C. Adoption of Non-Hegemonic Reform Alliances ............................ 85 III. CIVIL DISOBEDIENCE IN CRITICAL LEGAL RESEARCH THEORY .................... 89 A. Liberal Approach to Civil Disobedience ........................................ 90 1. Rawlsian Definition ................................................................. 90 2. Rawlsian Justification .............................................................. 91 3. Rawlsian Aim .......................................................................... 92 B. Critical Approach to Civil Disobedience ....................................... 93 1. Alternative Definition .............................................................. 94 2. Alternative Justification ........................................................... 96 3. Alternative Aim ...................................................................... 97 C. Incorporation of Critical Civil Disobedience in CLR Theory ...... 100 IV. APPALACHIAN CIVIL DISOBEDIENCE IN CLR MODELED REFORM .............. 104 A. The Surface Mining Control and Reclamation Act and Mountaintop Removal: Appalachian Civil Disobedience ............ 105 1. 1960s: Civil Disobedience Preceding SMCRA’s Passage ..... 106 2. 1990s to Present: Civil Disobedience and Mountaintop Removal Mining .................................................................... 108 B. Civil Disobedience in CLR: Innovative Approach to Appalachian Reform .................................................................... 112 1. Retrospective Analysis of Civil Disobedience in Appalachian Reform .............................................................. 112 2. New Futures: Civil Disobedience in CLR Modeled Appalachian Reform .............................................................. 114 V. CONCLUSION ................................................................................................ 128 I. INTRODUCTION Few would dispute the proposition that progressive socio-legal change has come slowly, if at all, in Appalachia. A century of environmental devastation and endemic socio-economic issues plague the region.4 Appalachia also faces 4 See id. at 20 (noting that “Central Appalachia faces formidable challenges in raising the standard of living and providing educational opportunities for the population.”); James P. Ziliak, Progress and Prospects for Appalachia, in APPALACHIAN LEGACY: ECONOMIC OPPORTUNITY AFTER THE WAR ON POVERTY 7 (James P. Zilliak ed. 2012) (“[T]he region continues to lag behind the rest of the nation on many measures of economic development and health, and parts of Central Appalachia share lingering characteristics of a poverty gap. to this day Appalachia . is often viewed as ‘the other America.’”); APPALACHIAN REG’L COMM’N, Strategies for Economic Improvement in Appalachia’s Distressed Rural Counties 3 (May 2012) (“While many parts of Appalachia have shown significant improvements in income, public, [sic] health and quality of life, others still languish.”); Sam Evans, Voices from the Desecrated Places: A Journey to End Mountaintop Removal Mining, 34 HARV. ENVTL. L. REV. 521, 525 (2010) (“[T]he impact of MTR 70 University of California, Davis [Vol. 41:1 unique structural problems with gender, class, and race subordination.5 And yet formal legal-institutional channels—whether legislative or judicial, federal or state-based—have, on the whole, yielded scant reform victories.6 Hegemonic interests such as pan-regional extractive industries working with captured7 governmental elites have long maintained an unchecked, insidious dominance. This dominance has been affected only recently, and scarcely to the benefit of the Appalachian citizenry, by the tumultuous energy market transitions 8 discussed in this Article. mines on the natural environment is outpaced by its impact on the people who live nearby.”); Joyce M. Barry, Mountaineers Are Always Free?: An Examination of The Effects of Mountaintop Removal in West Virginia, 29 WOMEN’S STUD. Q. 116, 128 (2001) (“Given the economic, social, and political situations in West Virginia, mountaintop removal operators have indeed chosen the path of least possible political resistance to the exploitation
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