NADER, RALPH

born Feb. 27, 1934, Winsted, Conn., U.S. American lawyer and consumer advocate, a leader of the consumer protection movement. The son of Lebanese immigrants, Nader graduated from Princeton University in 1955 and received a law degree from Harvard in 1958. Nader soon became interested in unsafe vehicle designs that led to high rates of automobile accidents and fatalities. He became a consultant to the U.S. Department of Labor in 1964, and in 1965 he published Unsafe at Any Speed, which criticized the American auto industry in general for its unsafe products and attacked General Motors' Corvair automobile in particular. The book became a best-seller and led directly to the passage of the 1966 National Traffic and Motor Vehicle Safety Act, which gave the government the power to enact safety standards for all automobiles sold in the United States. Nader then turned his attention to other consumer issues, calling for new or stricter government regulation of industry and business in various product areas. His professional associates, known as Nader's Raiders, presented scores of studies on such widely divergent items as pipeline safety, baby food, insecticides, mercury poisoning, pension reform, land use, and banking. In 1969 he founded the Center for Study of Responsive Law. He is considered to be a major influence on the public-interest movement, and his model of fact-finding followed by lobbying is much in evidence in the United States. Nader was credited with being the moving force in new legislation calling for stricter regulation of meat- and poultry-processing plants, coal-mine safety and health, and radiation emissions from television sets. He also was instrumental in the passage in 1988 of California's Proposition 103, which provided for a rollback of auto insurance rates.