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Bar Politics, Judicial Selection and the Representation of Social Interests*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 August 2014

Richard A. Watson ,
Rondal G. Downing  and
Frederick C. Spiegel
Richard A. Watson
Affiliation:
University of Missouri
Rondal G. Downing
Affiliation:
University of Missouri
Frederick C. Spiegel
Affiliation:
University of Missouri
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Extract

In modern political systems, parties undertake the prime responsibility for nominating public office holders, while interest groups attempt to influence public policy by seeking access to the centers of governmental power. Yet recent developments in the selection of state judges have given a private interest group, the Bar, a role in choosing members of the Bench which, in essence, parallels that of traditional party organizations. A Plan developed by the American Bar Association and the American Judicature Society, first adopted by Missouri in 1940, grants the legal profession a direct, formal role in the selection process; under its provisions, commissions, composed of lawyers, judges and laymen, nominate panels of names from which the governor of the state makes his judicial appointments. As the system works in actual operation, the Bar becomes the key group in the nomination process, since the lawyers and judges on the commissions possess superior knowledge about potential candidates for judgeships, and also outnumber the lay members of these bodies. Beyond this, the Plan restricts the discretion of the governor, who must make the ultimate appointment from among the three nominees. It also protects judges from ordinary political forces once they are in office, because subsequent judicial elections are in reality plebiscites in which appointees run “on their records” with no opponents.

Type
Research Article
Information
American Political Science Review , Volume 61 , Issue 1 , March 1967 , pp. 54 - 71
Copyright
Copyright © American Political Science Association 1967

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Footnotes

*

The material for this article is drawn from a general study, The Politics of the Bench and the Bar: Judicial Selection Under the Nonpartisan Court Plan, conducted by the authors with the assistance of grants from The Social Science Research Council and The Research Center of the University of Missouri. The forthcoming, fulllength study is to be published by John Wiley and Son.

References

1 See Key, V. O. Jr., Politics, Parties and Pressure Groups, 5th ed. (New York: Thomas Y. Crowell Co., 1964), pp. 18 f.Google Scholar; and Bone, Hugh, American Politics and the Party System, 3rd ed. (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1965), p. 549.Google Scholar Gabriel Almond and James Coleman suggest that “the development of a modern party system means that the performance of the political recruitment function by other structures, such as interest groups and the media of communication, tend to pass through and be processed by the party system before they emerge as acts of political recruitment”: The Politics of the Developing Areas (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1960), p. 18.

2 Initially the leaders of the profession sought to minimize the power of party organizations in electing judges through such devices as judicial nominating conventions, nonpartisan judicial ballots and separate judicial elections, and to enhance their own influence by means of referenda in which bar associations evaluated the capabilities of the various judicial candidates and passed on their recommendations to the electorate. When these approaches failed to bring the desired results, the leaders sought to substitute the Bar for the party organizations as the major agency in the recruitment process.

3 Peltason, Jack W., The Missouri Plan for the Selection of Judges (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1945), Ch. IIGoogle Scholar, contains an excellent account of the judicial reform movement in the United States and the role of various organizations and individuals in its development.

4 The role of the Bar in this selection system is to be compared with the one exercised recently in the appointment of federal judges. The ABA Committee on Federal Judiciary has established working relationships with the Senate Judiciary Committee, which possesses the confirmation power, and the Attorney General's Office, which helps to investigate nominees; but the Committee's function is informal and advisory, and whatever influence it exercises is at the sufferance of the Committee and the Attorney General. See Grossman, Joel B., Lawyers and Judges: The ABA and the Politics of Judicial Selection (New York: John Wiley and Sons, Inc., 1965).Google Scholar

5 This conclusion is based upon our general study of the Plan in which we analyze the relative influence the lawyer, judge and lay members of the commissions have exercised on nominations over the years.

6 This situation is to be contrasted with that in California where the Governor makes initial choices of judges to be appointed to the appellate courts, subject to confirmation by a Commission on Judicial Appointments, composed of members of the Bar.

7 In the twenty-five year operation of the Plan, only one judge has been voted out of office. This occurred in 1941.

8 Address by Glenn R. Winters, Executive Director of the American Judicature Society, before the Lawyers' Association of Kansas City on April 8, 1964, at page 8.

9 The Plan is utilized to choose judges to courts in Birmingham, Alabama, Dade County, Florida, Denver, Colorado and Tulsa, Oklahoma. In addition, California and Illinois utilize the tenure aspects of the Plan whereby judges run in noncompetitive elections.

10 Journal of the American Judicature Society, 48 (1964), p. 133. Mayor Lindsay has made a pledge to continue the practice in New York City, and to work for the permanent establishment of a nominating commission by constitutional amendment: ibid., 49 (1965), p. 124.

11 The American Judicature Society published in the August, 1965 issue of its Journal (at pp. 47–52) a speech by Royce H. Savage, General Counsel of Gulf Oil Corporation, suggesting that the Plan be extended to the federal courts. Senator Hugh Scott of Pennsylvania introduced a bill in the Eighty-Ninth Congress to accomplish this objective.

12 The rationale for the use of the political party rather than the interest group as the recruiter of personnel in a modern democratic society is that the party “aggregates” interests, that is, it combines, accommodates and takes into account a variety of social interests in the course of the recruitment process: cf. Almond and Coleman, op cit., pp. 38 ff.

13 Each circuit nominating commission is composed of two lawyers elected by members of the Bar residing in the circuit court jurisdiction, two laymen from the jurisdiction appointed by the Governor and the presiding judge of the Court of Appeals of the area, who serves as ex officio chairman.

14 The Constitution of the State of Missouri, 1945, Art. V, Sec. 29 (b), provides for the adoption of the Plan by voters in other judicial circuits, but the Missouri Supreme Court has ruled that this section is not self-executing and requires legislation to make it effective: State ex rel. Millar v. Toberman, 360 Mo. 1101, 232 S.W. 2 d 904 (1950). Several attempts to pass such legislation have failed.

15 The appellate nominating commission includes three lawyers elected by members of the Bar (one from each of the Court of Appeals' jurisdictions into which the state is divided), three laymen from the same jurisdictions appointed by the Governor and the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court who serves as ex officio chairman.

16 The Bar Association of St. Louis was established in 1874. See The Bench and Bar of Missouri: History of the Bar Associations of St. Louis and Missouri (St. Louis: The St. Louis Star, 1899), p. 7. The exact date of the formation of the Kansas City Bar Association is undetermined, but Pound, Roscoe notes in his study, The Lawyer from Antiquity to Modern Times (St. Paul: West Publishing Company, 1953), p. 315Google Scholar, that it was listed in an official report of the American Bar Association issued in 1887.

17 Carlin, Jerome deals with problems of legal ethics in Chicago in Lawyers on Their Own (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers Univ. Press, 1962)Google Scholar, and in New York City in Lawyers' Ethics: A Survey of the New York City Bar (New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 1966).Google Scholar

18 Some lawyers refer to this latter group as “defendants’ lawyers,” while others prefer to be more precise and call them “corporation attorneys.” In any event, all parties agree that they belong with the defendants' group with respect to this division within the Bar.

19 Peltason, op. cit., Ch. III.

20 The major studies utilized were Carlin, Lawyers on Their Own, op. cit.; his Current Research in the Sociology of the Legal Profession (New York: Bureau of Applied Social Research, Columbia University, August, 1962, mimeographed); Smigel, Edgar, The Wall Street Lawyer (London: Free Press of Glencoe, 1964)Google Scholar; and two articles by Ladinsky, Jack, “Careers of Lawyers, Law Practice and Legal Institutions,” American Sociological Review, 28 (1963), pp. 47–54CrossRefGoogle Scholar, and “The Impact of Social Background of Lawyers on Law Practice and the Law,” The Journal of Legal Education, 16 (1963), pp. 127–144. Wells, Richard refers to these studies as relating to “styles” of practice in “The Legal Profession and Politics,” Midwest Journal of Political Science, 8 (1964), pp. 166–190.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

21 Since the Missouri Bar is integrated, we were able to use the membership of the State Bar Association as our “population.” In May of 1964, we mailed a questionnaire to every other member of the Bar (3303 of 6606) and received 1233 replies, a 37 per cent response. This means that almost one-fifth of the lawyers in the state are included in our sample. Moreover, a comparison of the sample with the total population of Missouri lawyers analyzed in The 1964 Lawyer Statistical Report (Chicago: American Bar Foundation, 1965), indicates that it is very representative in such characteristics as geographical location of practice, law school education, and kind of practice arrangement. The age composition of the sample also reflects that of the State Bar with the exception that older lawyers are slightly underrepresented.

22 The organization was established in Portland, Oregon in 1946 by 11 men, and six years later had a membership of 2,000 lawyers located in every state in the nation. One of the leaders of the group, Horowitz, Samuel B., explains its origins, purposes and activities in “NACCA and Its Objectives,” NACCA Law Journal, 10 (1953), pp. 17–43.Google Scholar Recently the name of the organization was changed to the American Trial Lawyers' Association.

23 In addition to the publication of its journal, NACCA has been active in establishing lecture ships at law schools, writing articles for law reviews, developing a library on the rights of injured workers, and lobbying before legislative bodies. See Horowitz, op. cit., pp. 25ff.

24 For an article expressing this concern, see Hobson, Robert P., “NACCA—As Viewed by Defense Counsel,” Kentucky State Bar Journal, 20 (1956), pp. 170–172.Google Scholar

25 Although there were a considerable number of lawyers in each community who belonged to both the Bar Association and the Lawyers' Association, those with overlapping memberships were similar in characteristics to those belonging to the Lawyers' Association alone. Combining the two groups, therefore, does not distort the analysis, and we did this under the category of Lawyers' Association. Apparently, as our interviews seem to indicate, the decision to join the “rebel” organization (the Lawyers' Association in each city) represents the important associational commitment on the part of a lawyer, and a simultaneous membership in the older, official Bar Association tends to be a matter of tradition and form.

26 In addition to those discussed in this article, the fields included real property, municipal and administrative law, and negligence and/or compensation, equally for plaintiff and defendant. In developing the list, we were guided by the approach to this same subject in an official State Bar study entitled, The Missouri Bar—Prentice-Hall Survey: A Motivational Study of Public Attitudes and Law Office Management, 1963.

27 A recent article, “The Lawyers of Labor,” Fortune (March, 1961), p. 213, estimates that some 500 American attorneys serve unions, either as salaried “house counsel,” or as lawyers in private practice who are on a retainer fee. The 1964 Lawyer Statistical Report, op. cit., p. 26, sets the total number of lawyers in the United States in 1963 as 296, 069.

28 Our survey data do show, however, that lawyers tend to combine certain practice specialties such as corporate and probate and trust, and plaintiffs' and domestic relations.

29 Carlin, , Current Research in the Sociology of the Legal Profession, op. cit., p. 21.Google Scholar

30 The Statistical Abstract of the United States, 1966 (Washington, D. C.: Bureau of the Census, U. S. Department of Commerce, 1965), p. 230, lists the median income of dentists, lawyers and physicians as over $10,000 a year. No other professional, technical or kindred occupation reaches that level.

31 Ibid., p. 229, categorizes attorneys' salaries in seven work levels in terms of duties and responsibilities. The average salaries of the seven levels range from $7,248 to $24,288. Liebenburg, Maurice in “Income of Lawyers in the Post war Period,” Survey of Current Business, 36 (1956), pp. 26 f.Google Scholar, finds that in 1954 the median income of lawyers in the United States was $7,833, but one-third received incomes below $5,000 and one-fifth over $15,000.

32 Carlin, in Current Research in the Sociology of the Legal Profession, op. cit., pp. 11 ff.Google Scholar, and Ladinsky, , in his Journal of Legal Education article, op. cit., pp. 135 ff.Google Scholar, analyze income as a factor in the stratification of the Bars of New York City and Detroit respectively. Henderson, and Sinclair, in their study, Judicial Selection in Texas: An Exploratory Study (Houston: Public Affairs Research Center, 1964), Vol. 1, at p. 17Google Scholar, identify the disparity in incomes of lawyers in Texas as a source of cleavage in the urban Bar there.

33 We elicited similar information on the practice arrangement of each respondent during the past year, but there was almost no variation between the two kinds of data. This accords with the findings of Carlin, in Current Research in the Sociology of the Legal Profession, op. cit., pp. 16 ff.Google Scholar, and Ladinsky, , in his Journal of Legal Education article, op. cit., pp. 132 ff.Google Scholar, that lawyers' career histories show that they tend to remain in the same general social strata of the Bar in which they begin the practice of law.

34 Carlin, , Current Research in the Sociology of the Legal Profession, op. cit., pp. 25 ff.Google Scholar; Ladinsky, , American Sociological Review, op. cit., pp. 49 ff.Google Scholar; Riesman, David, “Law and Sociology: Recruitment, Training, and Colleagueship” in Evan, William M. (ed.), Law and Sociology: Exploratory Essays (New York: The Free Press of Glencoe, 1962), pp. 12 f.Google Scholar

35 In eliciting information on party identification, we patterned our approach after that utilized by the Survey Research Center at the University of Michigan.

36 A state-wide survey conducted in the Spring of 1965 by the Public Opinion Survey Unit at the University of Missouri showed that 60 percent of Missourians identify with the Democratic party, compared to 26 per cent who are Republicans. The large urban centers of the state are somewhat more Democratic: in Jackson County, the percentage ratio is 64 to 20, and in the St. Louis area (St. Louis City and St. Louis County combined), it is 62–24.

37 The 1965 state-wide survey also revealed that about 10 per cent of persons living in the two large urban areas in Missouri, as well as the state as a whole, consider themselves Independents. The Survey Research Center's 1964 study showed an identical figure for the national population. See Bone, Hugh, American Politics and the Party System, 3rd ed., (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1965), p. 480.Google Scholar

38 We realize there are no completely satisfactory criteria by which to evaluate law schools. We decided on these five on the basis of general reputation. Moreover, it is an objective fact that the latter four law schools, as of 1954 at least, had the largest law libraries in the nation. Blaustein, Albert P. and Porter, Charles O., The American Lawyer, (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1954), p. 206.Google Scholar

39 Recently this law school, along with the University itself, was absorbed into the University of Missouri system. It is now known as the University of Missouri Law School at Kansas City.

40 Such law schools are sometimes called “multiple division” law schools and frequently just “night” law schools. In 1963, about 90 per cent of the students enrolled in schools are not approved by the American Bar Association were attending night classes compared to less than 10 per cent in morning classes. See Law Schools and Bar Admission Requirements in the United States in the U. S. Review of Legal Education (Chicago: American Bar Association, Section of Legal Education and Admissions to the Bar, 1963), p. 19.

41 Proprietary law schools were generally founded as private profit-making institutions, but today many are incorporated not for profit. They have no University affiliation. See Carlin, Lawyers on Their Own, op. cit., p. 26. The Kansas City School of Law was not approved by the American Bar Association until it became affiliated with the University of Kansas City.

42 Carlin includes Catholic and proprietary schools with “mixed” programs in the same category in his analysis of law schools, ibid., p. 25.

43 Today all the law schools in Missouri are approved by the ABA, but in the depression period a number of unapproved schools operated in St. Louis, including Benton College of Law, City College of Law and Finance and Missouri Institute of Accounting, Law and Law Department.

44 See footnotes 29 and 34, supra. Of course, the two factors are interrelated. The processes of selfselection and firm recruitment result in graduates of prestige law schools joining law firms. See Ladinsky, , American Sociological Review, op. cit., p. 49Google Scholar; Blaustein and Porter, op. cit., p. 197; Smigel, op. cit., pp. 39 ff.

45 A yearly publication by Martindale-Hubbel, Inc., contains certain basic data on lawyers in all states. Volume II has the information on Missouri attorneys.

46 Of the 138 individuals we identified as officers in the two bar groups in Kansas City, only 3 held office in both; a similar number of officers of the two associations in St. Louis contained only 2 individuals who had served as officers in both organizations.

47 V. O. Key, Jr., op. cit., p. 463.

48 Constitution of the State of Missouri, 1945, Art. V., Sec. 29(d) and Supreme Court Rule 10.

49 In appellate commission contests, at least 10 of the signatures must be those of attorneys residing in a different judicial circuit than the nominee. Supreme Court Rule 10.10.

50 Supreme Court Rule 10.14.

51 The exception is the Lawyers' Association of St. Louis, which tends to nominate lawyers in solo practice.

52 Henderson and Sinclair, op. cit., at page 16 note the same courtroom animosities among Texas lawyers.

53 Plaintiffs' lawyers' business is generally on a “one shot” basis, that is, individuals who come to see them just once in connection with a personal injury. (See Carlin, Lawyers on Their Own, op. cit., Ch. 3, for a discussion of methods of getting this business through the use of “brokers” or “middlemen” such as policemen, ambulance drivers, etc.) In contrast, corporate and defendants' attorneys generally do their legal business on a long-term basis, often through “retainer” fees whereby clients pay to have time reserved for their affairs.

54 For an analysis of the analogous way in which shop size in the printing industry affects the internal politics of the two party system of the International Typographical Union, see Lipset, Seymour, Trow, Martin and Coleman, James, Union Democracy (New York: Free Press of Glencoe, 1956), Chs. 8 and 9.Google Scholar

55 An analysis of the respondents from both communities who do not belong to either the Bar Association or the Lawyers' Association in their area shows that a considerable number of them are employed by the government or by private corporations.

56 A number of defendants' lawyers in the Kansas City area recently have begun also to handle some plaintiffs' cases. This development has not yet occurred to any significant extent in St. Louis.

57 Constitution of the State of Missouri, 1945, Art. V, Sec. 29(d) and Supreme Court Rule 10.14.

58 Almost one-fifth of the members of the Lawyers' Association of Kansas City reside outside the state according to our survey data.

59 A recent Kansas City Appellate Commission race, however, was won by the plaintiffs' group.

60 Carlin, , Current Research in the Sociology of the Legal Profession, op. cit., at p. 11Google Scholar, states that firm lawyers in New York City spend more time in appellate courts, while individual practitioners come in contact mainly with lower courts. Our survey data on appearances before circuit and appellate courts in Missouri indicate that the circuit courts are more important to members of the plantiffs' bar associations and the appellate courts to lawyers belonging to the defendants' bar groups.

61 Our survey data show that about 10 per cent of the attorneys practicing in both Kansas City and St. Louis have let their names come before one of the nominating commissions for consideration as a judge.

62 The Report of the Judicial Conference of Missouri for the period beginning June 16, 1964 and ending June 15, 1965, indicates that the Supreme Court and three intermediate Courts of Appeal handled 1229 cases, while the lower courts of the state disposed of 88,792 cases.

63 No exact figures are available for Missouri on the amount of personal injury cases in the various levels of courts, but many of the trial lawyers we interviewed set the circuit court figure at twothirds or more. This is generally consistent with studies that show that 60 percent of the cases in New York and over one-half of those in New Jersey in recent years involved such litigation. See Rosenberg, Maurice and Sovern, Michael I., “Delay and Dynamics of Personal Injury Litigation,” Columbia Law Review, 59 (1959), p. 1117.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

64 The Missouri Bar was integrated by court order in 1944. For a general study of the subject, see McKean, Dayton, The Integrated Bar (Boston: Houghton-Mifflin, 1963).Google Scholar

65 It is only recently that the plaintiffs' lawyers have succeeded in having one of their group elected to the Presidency of the Missouri Bar Association. Although the President can conceivably affect the kinds of activities the Association carries on, most of our interviewees felt that this factor was not nearly so important to the plaintiffs' lawyers as the feeling that one of their men had “made it.”

66 “A Sociologist Looks at the Legal Profession” in Parsons, (ed.), Essays in Sociological Theory (New York: Free Press of Glencoe, 1954), p. 377.Google Scholar

67 Carlin, , Current Research in the Sociology of the Legal Profession, op. cit., at p. 19Google Scholar, discusses the lack of professional and social contact between the various strata of the New York Bar. The same general situation prevails in the two metropolitan communities in Missouri.

68 Smigel, op. cit., p. 173.

69 Missouri Supreme Court Rule 4.28 prohibits the stirring up of litigation directly or through agents. For a discussion of the problem of enforcing compliance with such canons of legal ethics, and the way in which the stratification of the Bar affects attitudes towards them, see Carlin, Lawyers' Ethics: A Survey of the New York City Bar, op. cit. and Reichstem, Kenneth, “Ambulance Chasing and the Legal Profession,” Social Problems 13 (1965), pp. 3–17.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

70 Under such arrangements, a lawyer receives a certain percentage (usually one-third in Missouri) of the judgment awarded his client; if none is awarded, he receives no fee.

71 Carlin, , Lawyers on Their Own, op. cit., p. 182.Google Scholar

72 Key, V. O. talks of “factionalism” in his Southern Politics in State and Nation, (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, Inc., 1949)Google Scholar, and Chambers, William N. distinguishes between factions and parties in his Political Parties in a New Nation: The American Experience (New York: Oxford University Press, 1963), pp. 17–33.Google Scholar

73 For methods of classifying state party systems on the basis of competitiveness see Ranney, Austin and Kendall, Willmoore, “The American Party Systems,” this Review, 48 (1954), pp. 477–485Google Scholar; and Schlesinger, Joseph A., “A Two-Dimensional Scheme for Classifying the States Accord- Review, 49 (1955), pp. 1120–1128.Google Scholar

74 De Tocqueville, in his classic study, Democracy in America, referred to lawyers and judges as the American “aristocracy” which acted as a check on the democratic element in the society. For a discussion of the reasons underlying the alleged conservatism of lawyers, see Murphy, Walter F. and Pritchett, C. Herman, Courts, Judges and Politics (New York: Random House, 1961), pp. 126f.Google Scholar

75 Grossman's analysis of the composition of the Committee on Federal Judiciary in his study, op. cit., shows that it represents primarily the conservative elements of the profession. For a discussion of the conservative public policy stands of the ABA over the years, see Schmidhauser, John, The Supreme Court: Its Politics, Personalities and Procedures (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1960), Ch. 4.Google Scholar

76 For a critique of this concept, see Schubert, Glendon, The Public Interest (New York: The Free Press of Glencoe, 1960).Google Scholar

77 Pound uses the phrase, “client-caretaker,” at p. 184, op. cit., as does Hurst, James Willard in his study, The Growth of American Law: The Law Makers (Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1950), p. 366.Google Scholar

78 Pound, op. cit., pp. 281 ff., lists Lawyers' Associations or Lawyers' Clubs (in addition to the traditional Bar Association) in Atlanta, Los Angeles, and New York. (Carlin, Current Research in the Sociology of the Legal Profession, op. cit., p. 20Google Scholar, states that membership in the two New York associations is highly correlated with size of firm, with the large firm lawyers tending to join the City Bar Association, and solo and small firm practioners, the County Lawyers' Association. It is possible that other such rival organizations exist, since less than 12 per cent of the local bar associations in the United States returned the questionnaire on which Pound based his study. For example, the Lawyers' Association of St. Louis is not listed, presumably because its officials failed to provide information on the organization.

79 See footnote 63, supra. The Statistical Abstract of the United States, 1965, op. cit., at p. 572, estimates that automobile losses paid in 1963 totaled some four-and-one-half billion dollars, or about 60 per cent of the premiums written. One study of the subject in New York City, Franklin, Marc A., Chanin, Robert H. and Mark, Irving, “Accidents, Money, and the Law: A Study of the Economics of Personal Injury Litigation,” Columbia Law Review, 61 (1961)CrossRefGoogle Scholar, states at pp. 32ff. that in a recent year there were an estimated 193,000 claimants in the City in personal injury litigation, with some payment made in 84 per cent of the cases. When the claimant retains an attorney, the rate of recovery is 90 per cent.

80 Hurst, op. cit., Chap. 13.

81 Berle, A. A. Jr., “Modern Legal Profession,” Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences, IX (1933), p. 340.Google Scholar

82 Included are Mills, C. Wright, The Power Elite (New York: Oxford University Press, 1956), p. 289Google Scholar; Rodell, Fred, Woe Unto You Lawyers (New York: Reynal and Hitchcock, 1939), pp. 3f.Google Scholar; Llewellyn, Karl N., “The Bar Specializes—With What Results?”, Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, 167 (1933), pp. 177ff.CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Stone, Harlan, “The Public Influence of the Bar,” Harvard Law Review, 48 (1934), pp. 6ff.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

83 One study of the use of lawyers by lower class persons showed that many of them were not aware of their need for legal services, and of those that were, only a small proportion actually went to a lawyer because of a concern with fees. See Koos, Earl, The Family and the Law (Rochester: National Legal Aid Association, 1949, mimeographed).Google Scholar Personal injury matters, however, are an exception, since contingent fee arrangements mean that a client has everything to gain and nothing to lose by consulting a lawyer. A study in New York City showed that among automobile accident victims, lower class respondents were just as likely to retain a lawyer as higher class respondents. See Carlin, , Lawyers on Their Own, op. cit., p. 154Google Scholar, citing Hunting, Roger B. and Neuwirth, Gloria S., Who Sues in New York City (New York: Columbia University Press, 1962).Google Scholar

84 Gideon v. Wainwright, 372 U.S. 335 (1963). The courts are now involved in deciding a line of cases relating to the particular stages of the arrest and detention process for which counsel must be provided, and whether the principle of the case should be applied to criminal misdemeanors as well as felonies. One law professor has suggested that the decision will force more and more law yers into criminal cases, and this will require that the organized Bar try harder to relate canons of ethics to criminal-law practice. See George, B. J. Jr., “A New Approach to Criminal Law,” Harper's, 231 (1965), p. 185.Google Scholar

A related development is the passage of the Criminal Justice Act of 1964, which provides for compensated counsel in federal courts for indigent defendants charged with felonies or serious misdemeanors.

85 The funds are administered by the Legal Services Program of the Office of Economic Opportunity. The first annual report of the organization, dated August 1966, indicated that over 160 programs proposed by local communities and groups had been funded. Forty-three of the states had programs, as did 37 of the nation's 50 largest cities. Of the remaining 13 cities, nine had applications pending at that time. The agency also reported that over 500 new law offices serving the poor were funded, and over 1000 full-time attorneys and countless volunteer lawyers enlisted in the War on Poverty.

86 Including the increased usage of lawyer referral services, legal clinics and group legal service plans, as well as improvements in legal aid programs. See Powell, Lewis F. Jr., “The President's Annual Message: The State of the Legal Profession,” American Bar Association Journal, 51 (1965), pp. 823ff.Google Scholar

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