Everyone Read The Script--But the Judge

It seemed like one of those open-and-shut-type cases one might see on a television courtroom drama.

Two Harvard-educated lawyers come to the aid of a group of Kansas farmers who don't want to see their land taken away and used as a site for a new power plant. The arguments seem reasonable: The acreage is zoned for agriculture, not industry. Kansas law prohibits any corporation from owning more than 5000-acre tracts of farmland, and the power company wants 12,800.

According to the standard TV script, the farmers win, and everyone, except the giant power utility, is happy. But someone changed the ending in Kansas this week.

The two Harvard-educated lawyers, Bruce J. Terris '54 and Richard Seaton '59, were there. The farmers, organized as the Concerned Citizens United, were there. The power company, Kansas Power and Light, was there.

But Pottawattomie County District Court Judge John Brookens, having heard the arguments, decided on a surprise ending of his own: He refused to grant a summary judgment that would have prohibited the power company from taking the farmers' land through eminent domain proceedings.

Eminent domain is a legal process which allows certain companies, such as public utilities, or government agencies, such as highway departments, to sue for the right to take land against the owner's wishes.

In the audience for this melodrama sits Harvard, which is the sixth-largest stockholder in KP&L, with 1.2 per cent of the outstanding shares. As in other cases, Harvard apparently has found the show worthy of neither applause nor jeers--nor, for that matter, of jumping up on the stage and attempting to influence the action.

So the lawyers and the farmers and the power company have returned to the court, this time to argue over what legal and environmental issues must be settled before the plant--a 2800-megawatt, coal-burning unit--may be built.

What the result in that case will be remains unclear, but it seems that the so-called energy crisis will have a profound impact upon the action both on-screen and off.