Word: legal-aid
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Many of the Supreme Court's recent criminal-law decisions have a common element: in one way or another, they reflect the law's discrimination against the poor. They have challenged the adequacy of the bar's long tradition of giving free help through legal-aid societies. Case after case has been a reminder that by waiting for clients to come to them-often in offices far from the slums-legal-aid services have apparently failed to reach vast numbers of people who need them, in civil as well as criminal matters...
...legal-aid societies as well as public defenders tackled 620,000 cases. Yet the American Bar Foundation estimates that 1,400,000 indigents a year are tried without lawyers in U.S. courts -to say nothing of the problems that afflict millions of other poor Americans whose rights are often routinely ignored by landlords, merchants and faceless welfare agencies. The result, say experts, is the breeding of a dangerous disbelief in equal justice...
Muscle for the Poor. One promising new remedy is to supplement legal-aid societies by setting up storefront "neighborhood law offices"-in effect, to send legal missionaries into low-income areas to educate the poor in how to assert their rights. In New Haven last year, for example, the Ford Foundation financed the prototype New Haven Legal Assistance Association Inc. Traditionalists raised a cry of "socialized law," warning, in the words of one lawyer, that "you cheapen the legal profession by putting it in a storefront and soliciting business." The county bar association voted its disapproval. But the state...
...Experience. In Oakland, Calif., four Government-financed neighborhood centers run by the county legal-aid society have done as much business in three months as they expected in a year. Oakland now hopes to double its $60,483 federal grant. In case after case, Oakland's centers have stopped collection agencies from attaching slum dwellers' salaries-thus halting job loss, family breakups and welfare problems that wind up costing taxpayers twice as much as a little preventive...
...canons of ethics sternly forbid, the association has voted to aid such efforts (TIME, Aug. 20). The trend may particularly benefit law schools. The University of Detroit Law School, for example, recently promoted a new state ruling permitting law students to try cases in court-a boon to the legal-aid clinic that the university is setting up with a $242,000 Government grant. The University of Michigan Law School is following suit. As one student puts it: "We're hungry for bread-and-butter experience...