Law School Davids Take on Goliaths : Environment: Students at the Environmental Law Clinic of the USD Law School are often outnumbered underdogs when they take on well-heeled legal opponents.

Even amid the framed diplomas, the Bill of Rights and the basketball hoop that hang on Richard (Corky) Wharton’s office walls, the tattered orange-crate label stands out.

There’s something ominously luminescent about the green hillside it shows near the Pacific Ocean, where the trees bear fat fruit that’s just a little too orange. “San Onofre Radioactivity,” says the mock label, “Full o’ Juice.”

The spoof, which hangs prominently above Wharton’s cluttered desk at the University of San Diego School of Law, is a souvenir from the early 1980s when Wharton, one of San Diego County’s leading environmental lawyers, represented the Friends of the Earth and other foes of the San Onofre Nuclear Generating Station. Their challenge of the plant’s license application on the grounds that the plant is dangerously close to earthquake faults made headlines for months.

These days, Wharton has a lower profile but an abiding crusade: USD’s Environmental Law Clinic.

Hailed by lawyers as the county’s only public-interest environmental legal watchdog, the clinic teaches from five to eight law students each semester by sending them into the field--not to mention the stream, the bay or any other place that the students find needs defending. The 11-year-old institution charges no legal fees but, under Wharton’s leadership, it has taken on some powerful opponents, from Southern California Edison to the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. And lately, it’s challenging San Onofre again.

Next month, law students Michael Brennan and Michael Haberkorn will appear before the state Regional Water Quality Control Board to present allegations that San Onofre is violating its national pollutant-discharge permit. Among other things, they allege that the plant’s cooling system has reduced by 60% the area covered by the San Onofre kelp bed--about 200 acres.

In another case, three more students are helping represent the Sierra Club, which is an intervenor in a pending lawsuit that could help decide when San Diego will upgrade its Point Loma sewage treatment plant. The federal Environmental Protection Agency filed the suit against San Diego last year after the city failed to comply with the federal Clean Water Act by the 1987 deadline.

The projects reflect the convictions of Wharton, whose energy fuels the clinic, even when money is tight. A fan of paisley and home-brewed beer, he likes to talk about what he believes is a growing activism among his students--even as he admits that his own college education in the 1960s was dominated by “ ‘Animal House’-type goings on.” In the buttoned-down legal world, many agree that Wharton stands out.

“When a lot of people think of lawyers, they think of someone in a suit and power tie,” said Thomas A. Penfield, an attorney who once worked at USD. “Corky’s more likely to show up in corduroys, a flannel shirt and soft shoes, and driving an Isuzu 4-wheel drive.”

Wharton, who does wear a suit to court, traces his environmentalism to one of his first jobs, working for a New York paper company he describes as “a polluting nightmare.” (The origins of his nickname, meanwhile, can be found on the comic page: as a child, Wharton resembled mechanic Corky Wallet of Gasoline Alley).

Now 46, he says his tenacity and determination were tested at an early age. When he was 24, the U.S. Army suddenly put him in charge of 140 troops and $1 million of equipment in Vietnam, right after his dictatorial predecessor had been “fragged” (killed by a grenade) by his own men.

“Needless to say, I was quite good to my troops,” he said, laughing. “But after that, everything else was easy. If things get really tough, I just say, ‘At least they’re not shooting at me.’ ”

The son of a Philadelphia shipfitter and a school crossing guard, Wharton likes to say he came West for good after “it snowed on Easter Sunday and I took it personally.” He graduated from USD law school and set out to emulate his hero, Ralph Nader, who Wharton admires for “pressing issues and defending rights that otherwise are not represented.”

Similarly, Wharton looks for cases that have regionwide significance that would not otherwise be taken by a private attorney--usually because there’s no money to be won. They’re not hard to find.

When the Corps of Engineers wanted to build a breakwater off Imperial Beach in 1986, for example, the clinic sued on behalf of the Surfrider Foundation to halt the project, because it was feared the breakwater would cause beach erosion. Two barges, one loaded with boulders and one bearing a crane, were in position, ready to begin building the $6.9-million wall of rock, when Wharton and his students won a court order halting the construction. The breakwater was never built.

“We won that case in three weeks, working round the clock,” Wharton said, estimating that if a private firm had been hired to do the job, their fees would have exceeded $40,000. “But nobody won any money. If we hadn’t done that case, it wouldn’t have gotten done.”

Other lawyers agree that Wharton’s clinic meets a crucial need. Compared to other California cities of comparable size, San Diego has “an obvious paucity of environmental lawyers,” said John Reaves, one of San Diego’s relatively few environmental attorneys.

“A lot of people who call me with a public-interest gripe, but who don’t have any money, I send them to the clinic.”

Wharton’s students clearly prosper by getting their feet wet.

“There are a lot of subtleties to law that you don’t learn in law school” classes, said Haberkorn, one of Wharton’s current students who plans to specialize in environmental law. He describes the clinic as “a tremendous opportunity to learn proper conduct and proper strategy. I just wish it was the only thing that I do.”

For Haberkorn, Wharton is an inspiration. “You need somebody who’s really impassioned about what they’re doing, and Corky is,” he said. “He’s a true environmentalist.”

Judging by where other students have ended up, they seem to have been inspired as well.

Two former students are with the federal Environmental Protection Agency, one is on the Council of Environmental Quality, one works with a legislator in Sacramento and others work in private practice in San Diego. And Wharton loves to help them learn to do it right.

“In detail. I want it in detail,” he excitedly told Haberkorn and Brennan as they drafted a list alleging the San Onofre power plant’s violations of its federal discharge permit. “Page numbers, line numbers. Everything should go in this baby. Give them everything we’ve got.”

Later, Wharton said he believes practical education should always go hand in hand with theoretical study.

“We put them in the middle of the case. They meet deadlines, face the stresses of dealing with real people, argue in front of real judges, with real verdicts,” he said. “Live ammunition, not blanks.”

Perhaps one of the most important things the clinic teaches, however, is how it feels to be outnumbered and outspent.

In 1981, when Wharton took on the Nuclear Regulatory Commission over the San Onofre power plant, he faced 11 attorneys and 24 paid experts. Wharton’s troops consisted of two law students and six volunteers. They lost.

“We’re always up against huge money, and we don’t have any. It’s almost like we’re going out of business every other year,” Wharton said. “But you still win, every once in a while. And you’re always there to keep them honest. That’s the important thing.”