Tue, Aug 18
|Collected Works Bookstore & Coffeehouse
Carla Chung Mattix, National Parks and the Supreme Court: Groundbreaking Legal Battles,
Many Americans revere their national parks as places of natural beauty and cultural significance—but few realize how often these landscapes have been shaped by the courtroom as much as by conservation policy.
Date, Time & Location
Aug 18, 2026, 6:00 PM MDT
Collected Works Bookstore & Coffeehouse, 202 Galisteo St, Santa Fe, NM 87501, USA
About the Event
Carla will be in conversation with Dwight Pitcaithley, former Chief Historian of the National Park Service.
Join us in-store or register to watch on Zoom.
Pre-order National Parks (publishing 8/11, $ 45.00, paperback) from CWB online here or call the store to order (505) 988-4226.
With more than 3,500 lawsuits involving the National Park Service, litigation has defined, defended, and sometimes even threatened the character of the parks. Without these legal fights, the Gettysburg battlefield might be covered with strip malls and the Grand Canyon reduced to a mining site.
This book examines five landmark Supreme Court cases involving national parks—Gettysburg, Yellowstone, Grand Canyon, Death Valley, and the National Mall. Each chapter blends legal analysis with historical context, tracing the origins of the parks and the disputes that brought them before the nation’s highest court. Spanning nearly a century, these cases reveal how the Court has shaped park policy, land…