The Early Years of Legal Services Corporation
The LSC Act created a Corporation controlled by an independent, non-partisan Board, appointed by the President and confirmed by the Senate, with no more than six of its eleven members of the same political party. A majority of the Board had to be attorneys, and the Board was to include individuals who actually would be eligible for legal s ervices. In addition, the Board was to be generally representative of the organized bar, attorneys providing legal assistance to the poor, and the general public. The Corporation was to receive federal funds and make grants to independent local legal services programs. Local programs were to be governed by their own boards of directors, setting their own priorities and making their own decisions about case acceptance, subject to the rules laid down by Congress.
The first LSC Board was appointed by President Gerald Ford and confirmed in mid-1975. The Board's decisions on major policy issues-selecting a staff with experienced legal services advocates, continuing the national back-up centers, maintaining a national training and communications capacity, adopting regulations that permitted full professional representation for the poor, and maintaining the basic staff attorney structure of the program-all reflected a desire to ensure that the poor received effective legal representation and an appreciation of the merits of the existing delivery system.
Most of the initial effort of the new Corporation went into obtaining increased funds from Congress to expand the reach of the legal services program. A study of the funding levels of local programs in relation to the population they served found that over 40 percent of the nation's poor people lived in areas served by no legal services program, and many of the remainder had only token access. On the basis of the report, the Corporation developed a "minimum access" plan, with the goal of providing a level of funding in every area of the country that would support two lawyers per 10,000 poor persons. The strategy proved successful. Congress rapidly increased the Corporation's appropriation from $91 million in FY 1976 to the "minimum access" level of $321 million in FY 1981. With the additional funding the Corporation increased funding levels in comparatively underfunded areas and funded new programs in previously unserved areas, mostly in the South and Southwest.
By 1981, LSC was providing funding to 325 separate grantees, covering every county in the United States, as well as Puerto Rico, the Virgin Islands, and Micronesia. These included basic field programs that provided general legal assistance to eligible clients within their geographic services areas, a system of separate programs to address the special legal needs of Native Americans and migrant farm workers, and a comprehensive system of state and national support centers, regional training centers, and a national information clearinghouse.
In 1977, the Corporation was reauthorized for another three years, without significant controversy. Some restrictions were lifted and others were clarified. "Improving opportunities for low-income persons" was added to the list of purposes of the Corporation, explicitly endorsing broad efforts to address the problems of the client community as one of the program's goals. Client participation on local boards was mandated. The provision of the Act restricting the policy research, training, and technical assistance activities of back-up centers was eliminated.
LSC began to focus on making local programs more effective through improved monitoring and evaluation systems. Efforts were begun to increase the involvement of private attorneys in the delivery of legal services. The development of state support became a high priority, and a number of new state and national support centers were funded. A centralized training program and an ambitious project to develop and produce legal services practice manuals in areas of poverty law were initiated.
Although in most parts of the country legal services had come to be accepted as an institutional presence, the expansion of the program into previously unserved areas was sometimes met with suspicion on the part of the local bar, politicians, and community leaders, who feared that the new breed of lawyers would upset the social order in assisting the poor to assert their rights. Many of the issues that had led to controversies a decade earlier in areas served by OEO legal services arose again in newly served areas.
As a result, congressional scrutiny of the program began to increase. In 1980, supporters of legal services in Congress decided not to proceed with the final phases of legislation reauthorizing the program because of the number of amendments imposing new restrictions that were pending. Instead Congress waived the rule requiring that appropriations be based on authorizing legislation and passed an appropriation for LSC for FY 1981 without an authorization. Several new restrictions were imposed on the program as appropriations riders, including limitations on legislative advocacy and representation of aliens, two issues that had become increasingly contentious. The Corporation's legislative difficulties in 1980 presaged problems to come. Congress has not enacted authorizing legislation since it expired in 1980, and the formula of waiving the rules to permit enactment of an appropriation with substantive riders has continued down to the present.
