The Gazette 1984

GAZETTE

MARCH 1984

drastically reduced, resulting in the closure of a number of offices. Unlike British legal aid, only a very small proportion of legal aid funds in the US find their way to private practitioners. Instead, grants are handed out to locally-based organisations, which in most cases employ salaried lawyers and provide a free service to those eligible. Eligibility is determined by the lawyers them- selves according to scales based on cost of living indices. Those who are below official poverty levels are eligible, but there is some variation from State to State and from city to city. There is some irony in the exclusion of private practitioners in the land of free enterprise from a source of income to which British private practitioners were given access by a Labour Government. President Reagan is trying to remove this anomaly by requiring 10% of legal aid funds to be channelled to the private profession; but the basic salaried system (parallel to the law centre movement in Britian) remains the major form of public provision. In Los Angeles, the Legal Aid Foundation in 1980 received over $3 million in grants which enabled it to operate eight law centres. Since the Reagan cuts, four of these have been closed, defeating the modest aim which had nearly been attained of providing one free lawyer for every 100,000 eligible members of the population. In California as a whole there are 76,000 practising lawyers, one for every 300 of the population. The work done by the staff of the Legal Aid Founda- tion and other such legal aid offices covers all the ordinary problems of the poor and deprived, especially housing, and family problems and rights under social welfare programmes. There are many immigration problems affecting those who have come to California in large numbers from Mexico and other Latin American countries. Much of the immigration work is handled by a separate organisation associated with the Legal Aid Foundation. Back-up Centres Plainly, legal aid offices cannot hope to satisfy the demand for legal help from those who lack the means to pay even the cheapest private lawyers. Other resources mitigate the shortage to some degree. The offices of the Legal Aid Foundation deal with individual casework, as do most other legal aid offices in the USA, but the Legal Services Corporation also funds 'back-up-centres' which provide specialist advice for all the legal aid offices in the area which they serve and undertake litigation to test major points of law which affect a large number of people. In the State of California there are some thirty legal aid programmes, each employing between three and thirty lawyers. The Western Centre on Law and Poverty is the local back-up centre. It organises regular workshops for all legal aid lawyers doing particular kinds of work. Experiences are exchanged, and strategies are worked out for dealing with new developments in the common problems. The back-up centre acts as a clearing house for the whole legal aid movement. Where it gets involved directly in litigation it does so usually in conjunction with lawyers from one or more of the legal aid offices. Much of the litigation takes place in the Supreme Court of the State, where the director of the centre sees himself as 'attorney-general for the poor'. Whereas in Britain the law centres have had to choose between allocating their resources between casework and more broadly-based

strategies of the kind which the back-up centres in the USA pursue (and have inevitably chosen the latter), in the USA there is room for both casework and a broader test- case strategy in the dual system of legal aid offices and back-up offices. Test-case litigation is also conducted by 'public interest law centres', which generally are privately funded through charitable donations combined with such income as can be derived from costs awarded in successful litigation. Class Actions In Los Angeles, the Centre for Public Interest Law does not, however, focus essentially on problems of poor people, but has achieved some remarkable successes in preventing or delaying damaging environmental develop- ments and by bringing class actions alleging race and sex discrimination. The class action procedure, by which a large number of people similarly affected may recover separate awards of damages under a single judgment, is a procedural resource not available in Britain, but which has been enormously successful, not only in providing redress for victims of widespread unlawful practices but in deterring such practices. Lawyers representing private litigants in class actions may receive contingent fees, but Public Interest Law Centres are precluded by their non- profit (charitable) status from accepting contingent fees. In civil rights cases the courts may, however, order the unsuccessful defendant to pay attorneys' fees, and these can contribute to their support. (Recent moves by the Reagan administration have reduced the level of such fees, and this may have the effect of reducing the scope of the work that Public Interest Law Centres can undertake.) Like the back-up centres, Public Interest Law Centres generally do not undertake individual casework or deal directly with individual members of the public. Their work comes to them through organisations, and often through other lawyers who cannot afford to take on test cases where the prospect of payment is uncertain. Voluntary Services The inadequacies of legal aid are also supplemented by the voluntary efforts of ordinary private practitioners. In Britain, the tradition of voluntary legal service, perhaps never as strong as in the USA, declined markedly after the passing of the Legal Aid and Advice Act. No doubt, many practitioners in Britain felt they were absolved from voluntary service by the contribution they were making through income tax to the legal aid scheme. In Los Angeles, 'Public Counsel' is an organisation financed wholly by local practitioners. It employs a small full-time staff of lawyers and has a panel of volunteers from any of the largest law firms in the city. Cases are referred to it by the Legal Aid Foundation, and by other agencies where the particular skills and resources of private firms may be of special value to poor litigants. In the field of civil rights, a national voluntary organisation of private practitioners operates: the Lawyers' Committee for Civil Rights, which was established after President Kennedy invited a number of leading lawyers to the White House in 1963 following racial disturbances and encouraged them to set to work to help secure redress for victims of racial discrimination. Many branches of the Lawyers' Committee have been set up in cities throughout

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