News Articles

Justice for All: Law schools can do a great deal to support grads' legal services initiatives

Nat Hentoff, Legal Times, 09-18-2002

Three days after his death in 1993, Thurgood Marshall's casket lay in state in the Great Hall of the Supreme Court. Speaking at a memorial service, Columbia Law School professor Eben Moglen, a former Marshall clerk, noted that the mourners had come through doors above which the Court promised "Equal Justice Under Law." Later, Chief Justice William Rehnquist said of his late colleague, and rightly so, that "no other individual had done more to make those words reality." 

But, as Marshall often and caustically used to say, the promise of Gideon v. Wainwright (1963) and its subsequent line of cases has yet to become a reality for huge and growing numbers of poor, working-class, and even many middle-class Americans. Some American Bar Association studies suggest that as much as 80 percent of the legal needs of low-income Americans aren't being met. 

The late Justice William Brennan Jr., a close friend of Marshall's, urged law school graduates to forego careers in large firms and practice public interest law. But fewer graduates appear to hear that call, and in tougher economic times some large law firms are cutting back on pro bono work. 

Of course, a helping legal hand doesn't have to come from a wealthy attorney. Many lawyers in solo and small-firm practice would like to do more. But lacking the resources, they often need some help too. 

In 1997, Kristin Booth Glen, dean of the CUNY (City University of New York) School of Law, saw a way by which law schools could do more than set up clinics for students to work with low-income clients. Why not extend the law school's resources and connections to those of its graduates who have become solo practitioners or work in small firms, and who actually believe in the school's credo, "Law in the Service of Human Needs"? 

WEAVING THE WEB 

From Glen's idea was born the Law School Consortium Project. Its founding members were CUNY, the University of Maryland School of Law, Northeastern University School of Law and St. Mary's University School of Law (the Texas school has since withdrawn). Their mission was to develop programs that support solo and small-firm lawyers in order ultimately to make legal services more widely available to low- and moderate-income individuals and communities. The funding came initially from George Soros' Open Society Institute. 

So far, the most active and wide-ranging part of that consortium has been CUNY's Community Legal Resource Network. Its project director, Frederick Rooney, a 1986 graduate of the first CUNY law class, describes the CLRN as "a unique public/private partnership" in which CUNY law grads in small "community-based" practices are supported and provided resources by the law school to enable them to "offer low-cost, sliding-scale and pro bono services to those who would otherwise not be able to find competent legal representation." 

These CUNY grads -- through what Rooney calls a "virtual law firm" -- receive, among forms of support, access to technology, help with billing and other management tasks, mentoring and legal research services through the network. 

The core of the CLRN is the practice groups, which, Rooney explains, are organized in areas such as immigration, family law and general practice. In a particular group, eight to 10 lawyers will meet regularly to share their experiences, to learn from each other, and to get advice and assistance from more-experienced lawyers. 

All the lawyers involved in the CLRN are given a membership directory listing CUNY law grads with particular experience in such areas as bankruptcy, civil litigation, criminal law, elder law, employment discrimination, estate planning, matrimonial law and human rights law. The directory includes street addresses, phone and fax numbers and e-mail addresses. 

The law school also provides a librarian to aid in legal research, a computer specialist and assistance from faculty members, retired senior lawyers and other lawyers with helpful expertise. 

From a series of stories written for the CLRN by former New York Law Journal reporter Victoria Rivkin, the evolving public-interest law career of Mercedes Cano illustrates how this project works. 

Cano came to this country at age 16 as an illegal immigrant. She waitressed, washed dishes and sometimes, without a place to sleep, spent the nights riding the New York City subway. Eventually, she worked her way through Queens College and CUNY Law School. And then with a $13,000 grant from the Initiative for Public Interest at Yale University, Cano started the Centro Communitario de Recursos Legales (Community Center of Legal Resources) in Jackson Heights, Queens. 

In her first year, Cano and her 12 volunteers saw some 700 clients with problems of many kinds. They might have been overwhelmed: "You can't possibly be an expert in all legal fields," Cano told Rivkin, "especially as a brand-new law graduate. I just didn't know all that much at first." 

But, through the CLRN, "I was able to field all these different legal questions," said Cano. "Without the network I might have had to defer my dream for five to 10 years while I got experience somewhere else. I would not have been able to go out on my own or to help this community right away." 

Cano also has clients whose legal needs are simply beyond the scope of her community center, and those she refers to other lawyers in the network. "I feel comfortable," she told Rivkin, "sending members of my community to the network attorneys because I know that they are reliable and not expensive." 

Moreover, Rivkin reports that CLRN lawyers and staff have become "mentors and friends" for Cano. They have helped draft grant proposals for the community center and offered legal seminars in Jackson Heights. "Having the practitioner network gives me the security that I am not completely on my own," said Cano. 

MORE HELPING HANDS 

Lawyers who do not run community centers can also get involved in CLRN projects called "Access Initiatives." A characteristic effort is the offering of free counseling to students at Baruch College and Queens College in New York. According to Rooney, arrangements were made through the schools' student government associations, and the lawyers were paid a low $50 an hour to provide free counseling to the students, the majority of whom were from immigrant and/or low-income families. 

Besides CUNY, the other original members of the consortium -- Northeastern and the University of Maryland -- also run practitioner networks for solo and small-firm lawyers. In addition to the Open Society Institute, other foundations (including the Ford Foundation, Booth Ferris Foundation and New York Community Trust) have chipped in to support their good works. And efforts are being made to expand the concept to more law schools. 

Rooney says that the consortium wants to replicate CLRN-like networks in a number of schools. Initiatives are under way at New York Law School; Syracuse Law School; Touro Law Center in Huntington, N.Y.; Rutgers University School of Law-Newark; Thomas E. Cooley School of Law in Lansing, Mich.; and the University of New Mexico School of Law. 

In 1986, Justice Brennan, speaking to the ABA's Section on Individual Rights and Responsibilities, warned, "We do not yet have justice, equal and practical, for the poor, for the members of minority groups, for the criminally accused, for the displaced persons of the technological revolution, for alienated youth, for the urban masses, for the unrepresented consumer -- for all, in short, who do not partake of the abundance of American life. ... The goal of universal equality, freedom and prosperity is far from won and ... ugly inequities continue to mar the face of our nation. We are surely nearer the beginning than the end of the struggle." 

Not too much has changed since then, but what should be a seminal force for "justice, equal and practical," has emerged in the Community Legal Resource Network. Law schools wanting to know more about dealing with the "ugly inequities [that] mar the face of our nation" can contact Fred Rooney at rooney@mail.law.cuny.edu or (718) 340-4451. 

As the Supreme Court said in Powell v. Alabama (1932) and Justice Hugo Black repeated in Gideon: "The right to be heard would be ... of little avail if it did not comprehend the right to be heard by counsel." 

Nat Hentoff is a longtime columnist for the Village Voice, a syndicated columnist for United Media/NEA, and a columnist for Editor & Publisher magazine. He has written numerous books, the most recent of which is "The Nat Hentoff Reader" (Da Capo Press, 2001).