Judges' efforts to pursue funding for unmet civil legal needs garner applause at LSC conference
The three-day conference this week celebrating the Legal Service Corporation’s 40th anniversary offered up a big portion of lovefest kudos from dignitaries such as Vice President Joe Biden and former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, as well as plenty of idea-sharing on best approaches ranging from fundraising to technology to finding ways to do ever more with even less.
But in conference rooms and ballrooms at Washington, D.C.’s Omni Shoreham Hotel, much of the greatest and most sustained applause among the 440 people who attended concerned efforts of the judiciary in more and more states to take leadership roles in pursuing what has long been the holy grail of legal services: increased public funding for unmet legal needs.
Despite advances in technology and help from law students and lawyers working pro bono, legal services providers have seen unmet civil legal needs rise from 12 percent in 1974—when the LSC was created by Congress to distribute money to nonprofit legal aid programs around the country—to 21 percent today, New York Court of Appeals Chief Judge Jonathan Lippman said at the conference. The legal profession has, in the words of several speakers gauging progress, failed “to move the needle.”
Lippman led off on a panel of justices Tuesday from nine state supreme courts, all of them leaders in pressing for increased public funding and other ways to stem the crisis of unmet legal needs. Lippman was instrumental in getting his state legislature to increase the judiciary’s budget for legal services grants up to $70 million from $27.5 million.
Lippman told the gathering that all stakeholders—legal services, law schools, the judiciary and the bar—must get the message out so that “people on the street” begin to believe there should be a right to counsel in civil matters. He mentioned that some now speak of “civil Gideon” and noted that when the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in Gideon v. Wainwright in 1963 that counsel must be provided to criminal defendants who can’t afford it, 23 state attorneys general filed a friend-of-the-court briefs in favor of Clarence Earl Gideon.
Continued efforts “can ultimately get us to the promised land, whatever you might call it, we all know what it is,” Lippman said.
The legal services audience was pleasantly surprised at the encomiums tossed their way by Monday’s pre-luncheon speaker, Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia. The justice has dissented in two cases—Legal Services Corp. v. Velazquez in 2001 and Brown v. Legal Foundation of Washington in 2003—that let the LSC challenge existing welfare law and to receive funds from interest on lawyer trust accounts.
Scalia told the luncheon crowd that James Madison, in the Federalist Papers, said that justice is the goal of both government and civil society and will be “pursued until obtained or until liberty is lost in the pursuit.”
Scalia then said the role of lawyers, as officers of the court in our adversarial system, is as important as that of the judge—because if there is “effective adversarial presentation, justice will ensue.
“So this organization pursues the most fundamental of American ideals, and it pursues equal justice in those areas of life most important to our citizens,” Scalia said, listing various ones such as civil legal issues as foreclosures, eviction and child custody.
Harking to statements by Scalia the following day, LSC President James Sandman and LSC board chair John Levi invoked the last phrase of our Pledge of Allegiance, “justice for all.” Chief Justice Ralph Gants of the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court said all in the audience should be acting on it, and suggested that the growing role of state judiciaries in pushes for public funding might be expanded.
“I think it’s something that all of us ought to be asking the United States Supreme Court, not only to be talking the talk but also walking the walk,” Gants said, to sustained applause.
