One product of the War on Poverty was the National Legal Services Corporation, a quasi-governmental agency charged with the distribution of funds to local legal aid programs. It was a monumental step toward leveling the legal playing field and made it possible to staff legal aid offices adequately. The provision of legal aid to those without means had long been a tradition in many places but all too frequently it had been haphazard, limited in scope and short on resources. A serious legal fight requires money, human resources and staying power. Funds channeled through the NLSC to local programs were intended to furnish that wherewithal.

Programs sprung up across the nation and their efforts soon bore fruit. Powerful forces suddenly found serious adversaries meeting them on ground they had owned outright. They didn’t like it. Rules that were patently unjust were struck down. Agencies that had long neglected those whom they were charged to protect found themselves forced to do their job. The technicalities were no longer all leaning one way. In many places, in small cases and large ones the sauce was a little more evenly split between the goose and the gander.

Perhaps as a result but certainly concomitantly laws schools began to institute so-called clinical programs. As a student at UCLA”s Law School in the early Seventies I benefitted hugely from its clinical programs mentored by two professors, Paul Boland – later a distinguished jurist, and another equally happy man whose name I forget. As certified law students we were able to appear in court under the hands-off supervision of a lawyer. We interviewed, we investigated, we represented in court and we learned in the way many people only learn: by doing. Our clientele were the poor and, as the odds dictated in the world we lived in, black. And what we learned had as much to do with trying to see through the eyes of another, eyes with a very different view, as it did with feeling the inherent clumsiness of the law.

Justice is blind. It is blind to much that it should see. But the more you see, the harder it is to make decisions and the work of the courts is to make decisions. This is why so much of the law is devoted to narrowing what can be considered. And this is why matters that anyone would consider in making any one of the countless decisions we make in life are all too often not up for consideration in court. In some ways what I learned in clinical programs was how to try and expand the visual field of the law. I am not faulting courts for this. Courts are institutions and all institutions require formats for accomplishing their work. It is a drawback of institutions always to be balanced against the advantages they offer. And it is universally applicable to private and public institutions alike. Large organizations are neither nimble nor particularly responsive.

Say what you may about the law – and there is much to say – it is a testament to its power that forces that had long enjoyed the virtually exclusive prerogative to shape and utilize it found the very existence of an adversary too much to tolerate. They reacted predictably moving swiftly after the election of Ronald Reagan to hobble and gradually defund the effort to ensure equality before the law.

But clinical programs lingered. They had proven themselves to be an effective teaching technique. That, as Adam B. spells out in the following, they should now find themselves facing the same pressures that blunted legal services is an opportunity for universities to step up. Surely in the centers of legal training it must be appreciated that in a system premised on an adversarial search for truth the absence of an adversary leaves the whole ship rudderless.

There's an old lawyer story.  One lawyer moves into town, sets up his office and barely ekes out a living.  Another moves into town and they both get rich.  Neither legal services attorneys nor certainly law students working at clinics are going to get rich.  But if we keep them around tilting at the powerful and sometimes at windmills the country will surely be enriched.

Legal Aid Clinics Under Attack

by Adam B

Tue Apr 06, 2010 at 07:28:29 PM PDT

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