No Money for the Voiceless
The National Law Journal
December 20, 1999
No Money for the Voiceless
By Laura K. Abel and Philip G. Gallagher
For 25 Years, lawyers funded by the Legal Services Corp. (LSC) have sought to ensure that at least some of the poor receive fair access to the civil judicial system. Tragically, in a system in which political campaigns are financed by the rich, the poor have almost no voice in either the legislative or executive branch. That leaves the courts as the only branch of the tripartite political system to provide the poor with any opportunity to speak on their behalf, and that access is now sharply curtailed by the paucity of funding for lawyers to represent them.
As the 106th Congress brings its first session to an end, partisans continue to argue over which political party “won” the battle over how to carve up the unexpectedly full budget coffers. But whoever, it was certainly not those who rely on federally funded legal services. Notwithstanding the budget surplus, Congress failed to provide LSC with enough money to fulfill the need of the poor for free civil legal representation.
LSC was allotted just over $300 million, to be distributed nationwide, an amount almost identical to the sum allocated during the Regan and Bush administrations - times of severe budget constraints and executive hostility to LSC’s mission. Given inflation, today’s allocation is worth less than half the 1981 provision.
LSC-funded programs employ more than 3,000 attorneys and are assisted by more than 59,000 private attorneys each year. Even so, in 1997, the American Bar Association estimated that the collective effort of legal services lawyers (including many programs that do not receive LSC funds) meets only about 20% of the legal need of the poor.
The situations in which the poor are left underrepresented involve the most pressing of human problems. One in six cases man funded by LSC involve domestic violence. Others involve tenants seeking decent living conditions, consumers fighting fraud or extortion, families seeking healthcare or public assistance, employees and others fighting discrimination, and parents fighting for adequate education for their children.
Each has incredibly high human stakes. For example, the Maryland Legal Aid Bureau recently represented a retired man whose landlord had been attempting to evict him and his wife from a federally subsidized apartment because neighbors complained that his cane made too much noise. Legal Services in North Carolina represented a 10-year-old boy with Down syndrome whose elementary school barred him from after school programs.
But for each client lucky enough to get a lawyer, there are four more with equally compelling problems who can get no help.
Keeping the account
Lawyers fir the poor also keep courts and government accountable, and enable society’s institutions20to function more effectively. For example, citing the lack of civil legal assistance, a U.S. district judge recently directed the Social Security Administration to improve the confusing notices routinely sent to SSI beneficiaries. He ruled, “Some of the problems presented by the agency’s notices might be alleviated if claimants were represented by legal counsel...[yet] the availability of assistance in dealing with problems raised by SSA’s notices is extremely limited.” Ford v. Shalala, 22 N.Y.L.J. 36 (1999).
Foes of legal services are powerful and, at times, rabid. Throughout the year, the efforts of LSC supporters have been diverted by the need to repel red herring allegations - among then, that some legal services offices inflated the numbers of clients they served.
The charges were not even relevant. Legal services funding is not tied to the number of eligible people living in the area served by a particular program. Thus, there is no incentive to inflate numbers. Nonetheless, House Republican used the allegations as support for an attempt to slash LSC funding to $141 million. So, instead of working to convince Congress to provide a realistic amount of funding, supporters had to fight a rear-guard action to get even as much as LSC received the year before.
So, who were the winners of the federal budget process? The wine industry received $1 million. Thirty-million dollars went to subsidize the timber industry’s construction of roads. And tens of millions of dollars were awarded to oil companies, preserving their privilege of taking oil from public hands at a fraction of the market cost. Apparently need isn’t as important as political connections.
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ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Laura K. Abel is a Staff Attorney and Philip G. Gallagher is a Katz Fellow at the Brennan Center for Justice at NYU School of Law.
