INTRODUCTION
In a seminal article published in The Yale Law Journal during the late 1970s, Professor Derrick Bell offered a stinging critique of the country's premier public interest law firm. (1) Bell critiqued conflicts that developed between attorneys for the NAACP Legal Defense Fund (LDF) and clients whom they represented in the Detroit, (2) Atlanta, (3) and Boston (4) school desegregation class actions. He concluded that in all three cases the lawyer-client conflict stemmed from a common source: LDF's failure to reconsider its policy of pursuing racial-balance orders as the sole remedy for de jure segregation of public schools after it became apparent that such orders ...