Activist Appalachian law firm wages war on coal

摘要

A meeting in 1997 with a coal miner protesting one of the largest strip mines ever proposed in West Virginia helped launch a young attorney's decadeslong fight against his state's coal industry. Joe Lovett was then a rookie lawyer for Mountain State Justice, a poverty advocacy group, when he met the man who would be hist first client, James Weekly of Pigeonroost Hollow, who lived a few hundred yards from Arch Coal Inc.'s massive Spruce mountaintop-removal project.