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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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