From The Past to The Future
Throughout the history of the legal services movement, legal services programs have provided assistance to tens of millions of low-income people. Legal services advocates have helped children gain access to health care, education and training, and better living conditions. They have helped poor mothers obtain child support from absent fathers. They have helped welfare recipients obtain childcare, job training, and employment. They have helped farm workers and other low-wage workers improve dangerous and unhealthy working conditions, and obtain the wages to which they are legally entitled. They have helped elderly people maintain their independence. They have helped residents revitalize neighborhoods decimated by crime, joblessness, and poverty, through economic development and micro-enterprise initiatives.
Legal services has fundamentally changed the ways in which institutions relate to the poor. It has provided an essential link between government and private programs and their intended beneficiaries. It has functioned to ensure that programs designed to benefit the poor actually do so. Legal services has made the justice system more responsive to the needs of the poor. It has brought tens of thousands of private attorneys into the civil legal assistance system as providers of pro bono services. It has produced successive generations of skilled poverty lawyers, some of whom have remained in legal services, while others have gone on to serve as law professors, judges, state supreme court justices, and government executives and elected officials at the state, local and national levels.
Many challenges lie ahead. The circumstances of many low-income Americans have changed dramatically. The federal welfare reform act of 1996, which made the most sweeping changes in social welfare programs since 1935, eliminated critical federal entitlements and legal rights to cash assistance, health care and child care for families with children. States can now decide wider questions of social policy that for the past 60 years have been addressed primarily by federal policies and programs. Welfare rolls have decreased dramatically, yet there are few mechanisms in place to protect those no longer receiving public benefits. Work and participation requirements, time limits, and new opportunities for access to childcare and health care are reshaping the individual legal needs of low- income people. The needs of low-income populations as a whole are also affected as states continue to make key decisions about who receives assistance, in what form and under what conditions.
Legal services providers also confront significant challenges. The resources available for legal assistance remain woefully inadequate to meet the need. As some states develop sources of non-LSC funding, including direct state legislative appropriations, disparity in the level of resources among the states is increasing. The most important source of non-LSC funding, state IOLTA programs, has been thrown into jeopardy by the U.S. Supreme Court?s 1998 decision in Phillips vs. Washington Legal Foundation. As the civil legal assistance system becomes more diverse, initiatives to increase coordination and avoid fragmentation are increasingly necessary. New technology offers potential to change the ways in which legal services are provided, as well as opportunities to improve the circumstances of low-income people.
For most of the last quarter of the 20th century, many in the legal services community subscribed to a vision of full and unrestricted federal funding of the Legal Services Corporation and its grantee providers as the way to fulfill the promise of equal justice. The threat to federal funding in 1995-96, and the resulting 30 percent cut and new restrictions, prompted the development of a new, more complex, more powerful vision for how this goal could be achieved. A continued national commitment to federal funding must be combined with the creation in every state of comprehensive, integrated, statewide systems of civil legal assistance.
These newly emerging, state-based systems will enlist the efforts of all possible participants and resources, not just as supporting players, but as full partners. A community of advocates will share the responsibility to ensure equal justice, a community that includes not just legal services programs but the private bar, social service and community organizations, law schools, courts, advocacy groups and poor people as advocates for themselves. These equal justice leaders in each state will share responsibility for effective legal assistance not just in their local programs or communities, but also throughout their entire state.
The energy and resolve which have characterized the advocates for equal justice throughout this century will ensure continued successes in this latest, unfolding chapter of legal services history in America.
