The Wonder Watchdog : Advocacy: For Robert Fellmeth, chairing a new endowment in public interest law at USD is just a continuation of his fight to speak up for the little guy.

No wonder Robert C. Fellmeth has been called “dangerous” and “zealous.” You can see it in his eyes in a 1970 Life magazine group portrait of Ralph Nader’s “Nader’s Raiders.” There he stands on the steps of the U.S. Capitol, on Nader’s right, looking impossibly earnest and self-righteous in his thin, dark suit. All the “Raiders” try to adopt Nader’s intense look, but Fellmeth’s deep-set eyes tell you he means it.

That was then, this is now. Former hippies became insurance agents and stockbrokers, and former Nader’s Raiders became corporate attorneys.

But Fellmeth kept the faith, and in the process he has become a powerful voice for the “small guy.” Just read newspaper stories about legal issues relating to any manner of subjects, and there’s a good chance Fellmeth’s name will appear. That’s why warehouse retailer and philanthropist Sol Price on Wednesday gave $1.8 million to the University of San Diego’s School of Law to fund a permanent professorial chair in public interest law. Fellmeth, 44, who heads the university’s Center for Public Interest Law, will be the first to fill that chair.

Sitting in an endowed chair is simply the culmination of Fellmeth’s lifelong devotion to the public interest.

This past summer, he took on the California Medical Assn., thought to be the most powerful lobby in the state, and wrote a medical discipline reform bill. The bill, introduced by Sen. Robert Presley (D-Riverside), will become law Jan. 1.

Recently he was locked in battle with state Assembly Speaker Willie Brown (D-San Francisco) and state Senate President Pro Tem David A. Roberti (D-Los Angeles) over Angela Lansbury’s anti-Proposition 131 commercials on the term-limitation initiative. He wanted Brown and Roberti to own up to their part in the commercials and has filed suit in San Francisco to force the disclosure.

“It’s the ultimate insult to the intelligence of the voter,” Fellmeth said. “You know what happened? You got this group who does commercials for the Democrats . . . and they try these focus-group approaches, and the only thing that works is when they attacked the politicians. Ninety-nine percent of the people backing those commercials are politicians!

“It doesn’t matter what the truth is. It works, so they use it! It’s unbelievable!”

For the last 10 years, Fellmeth has used his base at USD to watch over state boards and agencies. He and his students have accomplished feats as seemingly mundane as the abolition of the state Board of Fabric Care and as flashy as helping to write some of the 1988 insurance initiatives, including the famous Proposition 103 that is still in litigation. He and his students even rattled San Diego Gas & Electric when they started the Utility Consumers Action Network (UCAN), a watchdog group.

Alumni from the school are in influential positions throughout California. Michael Shames now heads UCAN. Gene Erbin, an attorney for the state’s Senate Judiciary Committee, wrote one of the consumer insurance initiatives in 1988. Another former student, James Wheaton, now heads California Common Cause.

Fellmeth’s long record of public interest advocacy has gained him praise and notoriety. Atty. Gen. John Van de Kamp named him the state bar disciplinary monitor in 1987 to oversee the bar’s attempts to clean up the profession. In 1982, then-Gov. Edmund G. Brown Jr. appointed him to the Del Mar Fair Board at a time when the board was being wracked by scandals. He even served as the chairman of the State Athletic Commission, which regulates professional boxing, wrestling and kick boxing.

Why Fellmeth?

Van de Kamp said Fellmeth is “tough” and “tenacious.” Sen. Presley called Fellmeth “idealistic” and a “great citizen.” Ralph Nader simply called him “Herculean.”

Fellmeth says he wants to right wrongs. With a law degree from Harvard, he could have picked any private firm to join, but “everybody I wanted to sue, they wanted to defend. That’s a problem.”

He gave his son the middle name “Quixote” in honor of Nader and to symbolize the fight of the small against the big. He admires reformers Thomas Jefferson, Theodore Roosevelt, Harry Truman and “Battling” Bob LaFollette (Robert M.. LaFollette, once a populist senator from Wisconsin). He has carried a sense of moral outrage since age 12, when he began to realize the world was not a fair place, but was down-to-earth enough to name his second son after Julian Javier, a second baseman for the St. Louis Cardinals in the 1960s.

Conversing with Fellmeth can seem like standing in a tangle of live electrical wires, synapses firing all at once. Fellmeth is known as a legal genius who could sit down in front of a typewriter without ever referring to a law book and create complex legal briefs with a multitude of citations that send opponents scrambling. His mind works so much faster than his mouth that court reporters have had to ask him to slow down.

His parents always included him in dinner-table conversations, and it has been impossible to shut him up ever since.

“I was the kind of person who would get emotional and angry over the things teachers would say and demand equal time to respond in class. Maybe I was a little obnoxious.”

Things haven’t changed much. Fellmeth is sometimes accused of being abrasive, too sure of his correctness and given to sweeping statements. He calls campaign management firms “professional liars.” He has said this society’s treatment of children will be remembered “the same way we look back on the Germans and Auschwitz and Buchenwald.”

“What’s that old saying?” asked former state bar President Alan Rothenberg. “Seldom wrong and never in doubt?”

Presley, who introduced legal and medical reform legislation that Fellmeth wrote, thinks Fellmeth sometimes needs moderation.

“Sometimes he wants to go further than is possible in the political arena,” Presley said. “There are times, I’m sure, when he’d like to just hang in (with an argument) and go down in flames.”

“He wasn’t a Nader’s Raider for nothing,” said Van de Kamp. “He is a progressive reformer of the old school.”

“If you over-compromise, you’ll end up with nothing,” Fellmeth said in defense of his stubbornness. “So many public-interest advocates end up with nothing, except the nothing bill that resulted and has their name on it so they get the credit.”

He has always been aggressive. He once fouled out in the second quarter of a high school basketball game. “I also hold a record, I think, for giving another guy a cut that took 13 or 14 stitches. Of course, he was on my team.”

But, said Nader, “He’s not arrogant.”

He doesn’t even dream of seeking political office.

“Nader taught me that you can have more of an impact on the outside.”

In fact, he has not held any office since he was elected senior class president of his Hawaii high school.

He tried once, at Stanford, but lost the election for student body president to famous anti-war protester David Harris.

Fellmeth said he found his calling in January of 1968: “I wrote Nader and told him I wanted to join him in his judicious jihad,” Fellmeth laughed, using the Arabic term for a holy war. “I thought that was really clever. I didn’t know what a jihad was until I looked it up, and I knew Nader was an Arab. Of course, it turns out he’s from the Christian part of Lebanon and his town is surrounded by people who want to jihad his family to death.”

Fellmeth became one of the first three Nader’s Raiders. It was a heady time. He worked not only with Nader, but also with future luminaries such as journalist James Fallows and Edward Cox, who later married Tricia Nixon.

“I remember Ed Cox was dating Tricia Nixon and trying desperately to scrape the Eugene McCarthy sticker off his car,” Fellmeth said, giggling.

“I picked him because of his versatility,” said Nader in a phone interview. “He could handle legal, economic and scientific issues. He’s a synthesizer, and he actually produces work. He never gets writer’s block.”

That’s why San Diego Dist. Atty. Edwin L. Miller Jr. made Fellmeth the deputy district attorney in charge of the nation’s first local antitrust unit in 1975.

Fellmeth’s first target was the National Assn. of Realtors, as well as its local and state arms. By the time the dust had cleared, the way real estate was listed and sold in the United States had been changed. He helped end the mandatory 6% commission for agents and opened the Multiple Listing Service to brokers outside the associations.

His fellow deputies thought so much of Fellmeth that, when they become embroiled in a contract dispute with the county, Fellmeth was the one they asked to go to court.

“We had a lot of faith in him,” recalled Anthony Samson, who worked with Fellmeth and is still with the district attorney’s office. “He tended to get the job done, and most of the DAs knew that.”

He even tried to reform boxing. He served for four years on the State Athletic Commission, chairing it in 1980 and 1981 and instituting the nation’s first and only pension plan for boxers.

“The whole idea that the heavyweight champion of the world (Joe Louis) would sit there and be a doorman in Las Vegas after all the pleasure he gave all those people was not humane,” argued Fellmeth, his voice rising as if the issue were pending today.

In 1986, the Legislature was so inundated with letters about how the State Bar of California mishandled complaints, it established a monitor over the bar’s disciplinary system under the auspices of the attorney general’s office.

Van de Kamp picked Fellmeth, who still holds the job.

“In this job, you needed someone who could put pressure on the bar to engage in constructive change,” said Van de Kamp in a telephone interview. “You have to be tough.”

At first, the bar despised the idea of an outside monitor.

“He came aboard as an outsider and severe critic and he was viewed as someone who was not friendly and would not be fair, but I think he has won people over,” said current bar President Chuck Vogel, a Los Angeles lawyer.

In 1988, Fellmeth wrote a 35-part bill to reform bar discipline and handed it to Presley. The bill passed and, in the two years since, the system has become a model for other states.

But there is so much more to be done. For example, he wants to get his new Children’s Advocacy Institute into high gear, and the district attorney has asked him to look into gasoline pricing.

Twenty years ago he quit Ralph Nader because the hours were too long.

Things haven’t lightened up.