How They'd Deny Virginia's Poor
The Washington Post
May 15, 2000
How They’d Deny Virginia’s Poor
By Laura K. Abel and Kimani Paul-Emile
Swindled seniors, exploited migrant workers and battered women: Who would deny them access to equal representation in the courts? The supporters of a bill pending in the Virginia Senate would. Senate Bill 760, along with two budget amendments, would bar many low-income people from receiving the aid of state-funded legal services lawyers in civil cases. And for those low-income Virginians who still qualified for such help, the bill would bar those lawyers from using the same important tools available to others in the state who are able to pay for legal counsel.
The legislation is apparently the result of hard lobbying by the American Farm Bureau Federation, the nation?s largest farm lobby. For decades, this corporate giant has fought hard against health and safety protections for farm workers. In the mid-1980s, it opposed a proposed federal rule requiring farmers to provide toilets and places for fruit and vegetable pickers to wash their hands. Similarly, it has fought to keep open a loophole in federal labor laws that allows children of elementary-school age to work in the fields.
In the past three years, the nonprofit Virginia Justice Center, which is funded by state and other sources, has successfully represented migrant workers forced to live in housing exposed to pesticides and animal wastes and deprived the minimum wage and overtime. Now the Farm Bureau is attempting to deny most agricultural workers the ability to obtain legal counsel to fight these and other abuses. Even the Farm Bureau, should have cause to be embarrassed by some of the consequences of this legislation. Because the bill would prevent undocumented immigrants from obtaining legal services representation, many battered wives would be left at the mercy of their assailants, unable to receive the assistance of state-funded lawyers to help them obtain restraining orders. Moreover, all low-income Virginians would be effectively prevented from participating in class-action lawsuits, no matter how urgently needed.
The ban on class actions by legal services lawyers is particularly debilitating for low-income people because such suits are an efficient and effective way--often the only way--to address and correct serious harms that affect more than one person. For example, in 1994 the Central Virginia Legal Aid Society and the Virginia Poverty Law Center represented a 67-year-old widow living on Social Security and several hundred other low-income Virginians who had been tricked into signing home mortgages accompanied by high, undisclosed broker’s fees. As a result, several mortgage brokers and a financial services company were required to pay each victim as much as $7,500. Had the Senate bill then been in place, restricting the lawyers to proceeding only on behalf of the individual widow, the many other victims would likely never have been compensated for their losses.
The other proposed restrictions are equally harmful. State-funded legal services attorneys would be barred from representing clients in a range of important actions, such as challenging welfare laws, representing prisoners even in non-criminal proceedings such as child custody disputes or defending public housing residents in eviction proceedings when those proceedings rest on an accusation of illegal drug activity. Moreover, these lawyers for the poor would be barred from seeking attorneys’ fees from opposing parties. While legal services attorneys do not profit personally from attorneys’ fees, the threat of an attorneys’ fee award plays an essential role in deterring illegal behavior.
Most disturbing of all is that the legislation seems intended to extend the whole set of restrictions to the work of lawyers for the poor even where such work is supported by non-state funds. While it is troubling for a democratic society whenever the government tries to undercut the quality of the legal representation it offers to those unable to afford counsel, it is even further out of bounds for the government to undercut the legal representation that private citizens seek to make available to those in need.
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ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Laura K. Abel and Kimani Paul-Emile are Staff Attorneys at the Brennan Center for Justice at NYU School of Law.
