SEATTLE - Russell C. Brooks, an attorney best known for challenging Endangered Species Act protections - protections he deemed government overreaching - died of a heart attack Sunday, the Pacific Legal Foundation said. He was 41.

Brooks headed the foundation's Northwest office in Bellevue, Wash.

The foundation “has lost a valued friend and a superb attorney, and America has lost one of the leading courtroom defenders of constitutional property rights, limited government, and a balanced approach to environmental protection,” its president, Rob Rivett, said Tuesday in a news release.

Coos County residents are sure to remember Brooks' name. He handled the county's snowy plover case in opposition to U.S. Fish and Wildlife's critical habitat designations for the threatened shorebird. More recently, he represented the Charleston-based Oregon Trollers Association in a 2005 lawsuit against the National Marine Fisheries Service, when the feds didn't count hatchery fish along with naturally spawning fish in setting 2005 salmon seasons.

He also won a federal court challenge in Oregon in 2001 - the Alsea Valley Alliance case - that said federal officials couldn't protect wild coho salmon off the coast of Oregon if they did not also protect the hatchery fish swimming next to them.

“The government's arbitrary low-balling of the salmon count was harmful to landowners, because the government restricted land use to protect fish that weren't actually in danger, and injurious to fishermen because it led bureaucrats to mandate unnecessarily low limits on salmon catches,” the Pacific Legal Foundation said in the statement.

Brooks continued to represent the Alsea Valley Alliance, a coalition of sport fishermen, and was to argue in federal court in Eugene in April that all 16 Endangered Species Act listings for salmon in the West should be invalidated on the grounds that federal officials are not properly counting hatchery fish when determining if a species needs protection.

“He believed in fighting for the rights of property owners against government intervention,” said Timothy Harris, general counsel for the Building Industry Association of Washington. “It's a tremendous blow to our industry and to people in the state of Washington.”

Brooks joined the Pacific Legal Foundation, a conservative public-interest law firm, in 1999, after graduating from the University of the Pacific's McGeorge School of Law in Sacramento, Calif. He is survived by his wife, Rhonda; a 5-year-old son, Austin; and a 2-year-old daughter, Savannah.

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