Donald K. Ross, who as an innovative and pragmatic public interest lawyer and philanthropist galvanized a generation of students into doing good, died on Saturday at a nursing home in Salisbury, Conn. He was 78.
His wife, the poet and novelist Helen Klein Ross, said the cause was lymphoma.
Mr. Ross was one of the original Nader’s Raiders, the group of two dozen or so freshly minted law school students mustered by Ralph Nader in the early 1970s to challenge government and corporate bureaucracy. It grew into a national network of consumer crusaders.
In an email, Mr. Nader said Mr. Ross had built “sustainable democratic institutions with an extraordinary civic personality of resilient stamina, motivating skills and relentless focus on results.”
Honing the strategies he devised as student body president to revive Fordham University’s famed football legacy, Mr. Ross was for five decades at the forefront of movements on behalf of consumer protection, government ethics, environmentalism, health care, voting rights, tax reform and access to mass transit, as well as the movement to close nuclear power plants after the partial meltdown of a reactor at Three Mile Island in Pennsylvania in 1979.
