Constraining aid, retrenching access: Legal services after the rights revolution

In recent years we have witnessed “a disturbing pattern of legal attacks on public-interest lawyers… targeting every one of the principal sources of support for progressive public-interest law.” As part of a series of broader attacks on the public interest movement that emerged in the late 1960s, this trend has also turned toward constraining the ability of the nation's poor to find adequate legal representation. By using a variety of “silencing doctrines” to attack the primary sources of civil legal advocacy – the Legal Services Corporation, state Interest on Lawyers Trust Accounts, law school clinics, and civil rights attorney's fees – conservatives have, in recent years, dramatically undermined the operation and reach of public interest lawyering. These attacks have a profound impact on access to justice for the poor in the United States, particularly when viewed in the context of the already highly limited support that low-income Americans have to seek equal justice under the law: while estimates vary, the roughly forty-five million Americans that qualify for civil legal aid are served by only 5,000–6,000 legal aid lawyers that specifically serve the poor, at a rate of roughly one lawyer for every 6,000–9,000 potential clients, depending on the study. Put another way, a 2009 report found that for every one low-income person served, another is turned away. Of these silencing doctrines, attacks on the funding for and operation of the Legal Services Corporation (LSC) are a particularly important part of the conversation regarding private enforcement. LSC is government-sponsored, private, for-profit corporation that was established by Congress in 1974 in order to “promote equal access to the system of justice and improve opportunities for low-income people throughout the United States by making grants for the provision of… civil legal assistance to those… unable to afford legal counsel.” Today, as the nation's largest funder of civil legal services in the country, LSC serves close to two million low-income Americans each year, with over half of its work devoted to claims involving family law, domestic violence, and housing. It also works to ensure that individuals receive government benefits (such as Medicare and disability), litigates consumer issues, and takes on civil rights cases related to employment, disability, and individual rights, among others.