Charles M. Haar Dies at 91; Used Courts to Clean Boston Harbor
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Charles M. Haar, a Harvard Law School professor who helped spur the cleanup of the notoriously befouled Boston Harbor through the strategic use of judicial power, died on Jan. 10 in Miami. He was 91 and lived in Key Biscayne, Fla., and Princeton, N.J.
The cause was congestive heart failure, his daughter, Susan Eve Haar, said.
Mr. Haar advocated robust government regulation of, and intervention in, urban development. In the 1950s, he was among the first law professors anywhere to introduce students -- including a young Michael S. Dukakis -- to the emerging field of land-use law. In 1958 he wrote the influential "Land-Use Planning: A Casebook on the Use, Misuse and Re-Use of Urban Land."
Mr. Haar was given several chances to put his beliefs into practice on a big scale. In 1966 he helped create the Model Cities program, President Lyndon B. Johnson's effort to direct federal urban renewal money to specific neighborhoods in cities willing to abide by numerous regulatory criteria.
He was later a special court-appointed master in a case filed in 1982 by Quincy, Mass., against the state commission in charge of the metropolitan Boston sewer system. In August 1983, Mr. Haar reported to Judge Paul G. Garrity of Superior Court that Quincy's beaches were contaminated with fecal matter, tampon applicators, condoms, grease and oil overflowing from the system, and that 863 million gallons of raw sewage had been dumped into the harbor in the first five months of the year.
Allowing that he was not the first to document such conditions in the face of official indifference and inaction, Mr. Haar told The New York Times, "If you don't have a court order, you can kiss this report goodbye."
Fifteen months later, he had that order. Holding a copy of Mr. Haar's report for the courtroom to see, Judge Garrity ordered a moratorium on any new commercial connections to the Boston sewer system, threatening to bring a halt to what was then a $500 million-a-year building boom. A month later, their attention suitably focused, political leaders -- including Mr. Dukakis, who was now governor -- created the Massachusetts Water Resources Authority, an independent agency that was given broad powers to make needed improvements. A corner was turned.
"There's nothing like having a court looking over your shoulder to make sure something happens," Mr. Dukakis said in a telephone interview this week.
Mr. Haar said the courts were indispensable in solving what was known as the tragedy of the commons. Though the harbor belonged in principle to everyone, "no single entity felt duty-bound to care for it," he wrote in "Mastering Boston Harbor: Courts, Dolphins, and Imperiled Waters" (2005). Thus it was being lost to all. "The energetic judicial response to prior legislative inertia was the most extraordinary and precedent-setting feature of Boston Harbor's journey from a national disgrace to a symbol of national pride."
Charles Monroe Haar was born on Dec. 3, 1920, in Antwerp, Belgium, to Benjamin Haar, a diamond cutter, and the former Dora Eisner. His family immigrated to the United States when he was a baby. He received a bachelor's degree from New York University and a master's degree in economics from the University of Wisconsin. In World War II, he served in the Pacific theater as a Japanese-language specialist in naval intelligence. He received his law degree from Harvard in 1948.
His wife, Suzanne Keller, died of a stroke in December 2010 in Miami. Besides his daughter, he is survived by two sons, Jeremy and Jonathan, and five grandchildren. His first marriage, to Natalie Zinn, ended in divorce.
Mr. Haar joined the Harvard faculty in 1952. Mr. Dukakis, who graduated in 1960, recalled looking forward to Professor Haar's land-use course in his third year. "A lot of my interest in community development came out of that course," he said. "Nobody else was teaching this."
In 1972, Mr. Haar was named Louis D. Brandeis professor of law. He remained at Harvard until 1991, though his academic career was interrupted by three years of government service, as assistant secretary in the Department of Housing and Urban Development, beginning in 1966.
Before teaching, Mr. Haar practiced real estate law at the Sheraton Corporation of America.
He came into a legal environment that regarded private property as sacrosanct, as it had been held in 18th-century England, when William Pitt said that the poorest man in his cottage could defy the crown, remarking that "the rain may enter -- but the king of England cannot enter."
In contrast, Mr. Haar wrote in 1958 that by upholding urban renewal legislation, the Supreme Court had "ruled in effect that the king not only may enter, but may remain, in the name of the general good, indeed for the very purpose of keeping the rain out."
First Published January 18, 2012 12:00 am
