10 - Evolution of Legal Services in the United States: From the War on Poverty to Civil Gideon and Beyond

Summary

Jeanne Charn, a pioneer in the field of clinical legal services for poor people, describes how the U.S. anti-poverty-thrust of the legal services movement in the 1960s led to a divergence of U.S. policy from government policy in England and other countries where the goal was to assure legal assistance for all. Charn calls for a broader definition of legal assistance that offers meaningful legal assistance without necessarily guaranteeing an attorney.

Since the 1990s the main policy agenda of access to justice activists in the United States has been an effort to obtain a civil Gideon – a guarantee of attorneys for everyone the market cannot serve. The civil Gideon movement rests on two, lawyer-centric assumptions. The first is that access requires the assistance of an attorney. The second is that, but for cost barriers, people would flood lawyers’ offices seeking representation. These assumptions are belied by the experience of government-funded legal services in the United States and peer nations, and by empirical research on the public's responses to law-embedded problems.

While the civil Gideon movement has had little success, new ways of providing legal assistance have emerged. Innovation in service delivery is producing a diverse supply side that increasingly incorporates technology, encourages self-help, supports institutional reforms that enable self-help, and is keenly attuned to consumer preferences. In what follows, I argue that a diverse, consumer-centered delivery system with many types of providers is the best policy – better than a Civil Gideon – if our goal is to substantially reduce access disparities not just for the poor but for moderate- and middle-income people as well.

ANTI-POVERTY WARRIORS IN THE OEO YEARS

In the United States we have never had a right to lawyer assistance in civil matters. Government-funded legal services began in 1965 as a component of the Johnson administration's War on Poverty. The Office of Economic Opportunity (OEO) Legal Services focused exclusively on the very poor and rejected universal access as a goal. OEO leadership prioritized law reform and systemic change over service to individuals and evaluated its grantees accordingly.

Many OEO lawyers embraced legislative and test case reforms and had remarkable success litigating poor people's issues in the Supreme Court. Others pursued systemic change at the local level in alliance with mobilized community groups. Lawyers who took this approach encouraged self-help, employed lay advocates, and preferred a community-led strategy to a lawyer-led strategy.