History of Civil Legal Assistance Research Guide

This book re-examines fundamental assumptions about the American legal profession and the boundaries between 'professional' lawyers, 'lay' lawyers, and social workers. It demonstrates that nineteenth-century women's organizations first offered legal aid to the poor and that middle-class women functioning as lay lawyers, provided such assistance. By the early twentieth century, male lawyers founded their own legal aid societies, creating an imagined history of legal aid and a blueprint for its future in which women played no role and their accomplishments were intentionally omitted. In response, women social workers offered harsh criticisms of legal aid leaders and developed a more robust social work model of legal aid. These different models produced conflicting understandings of expertise, professionalism, the rule of law, and ultimately, the meaning of justice for the poor.

An account of the entire history of civil legal aid from its inception in 1876 to the current day. This three-volume work covers the personalities and events leading to a national legal aid movement - and decades later, the federal government's entry into the field, and its creation of a unique institution, an independent Legal Services Corporation, to run the program. The narrative also covers the landmark court victories the attorneys won and the political controversies those cases generated, along with the heated congressional battles over the shape and survival of the Legal Services Corporation. In the final chapters, the author assesses the current state of civil legal aid and its future prospects in the United States.

The LSC as it exists today is the single largest source of funding for civil legal assistance to the nation’s poor, an innovator in technology and a model for partnerships that help low-income Americans maintain livelihoods, keep a roof over their heads, and escape violence. This page describes the history of this organization, starting from its inception in 1974.

The Consortium for the National Equal Justice Library (CNEJL), conceived of by Justice Earl Johnson, Jr. and developed by the American Bar Association (ABA), the National Legal Aid and Defender Association (NLADA), the Association of American Law Schools (AALS), and the American Association of Law Libraries (AALL). Their website contains much information on the history of legal aid in the United States, including detailed histories of civil legal aid, public defense, and state & local legal aid organizations. Additionally, the CNEJL has a collection of 140 oral histories by early leaders of federally funded civil legal aid and public defense (indigent criminal defense), many of whom were active during the 1960s-1990s.

A one-page overview of the history and current situation of civil legal aid by the National Legal Aid & Defender Association (NLADA), America’s oldest and largest nonprofit association devoted to excellence in the delivery of legal services to those who cannot afford counsel.

This paper, the 7th in the Brennan Center for Justice’s Access to Justice series, discusses the organizations and individuals responsible for imposing funding cuts and restrictions on civil legal aid lawyers, particularly those in programs receiving federal funds from the Legal Services Corporation.

As the disparity in income between the poor and the wealthy continues to expand, the work of poor people's lawyers remains vital today. This article sketches the history of poor people's lawyers from the late 1800s to the early 1960s, when in 1964, for the first time, the federal government allocated substantial funding to lawyers for the poor. It also focuses on the work of lawyers in the 1960s, examining their strategy to create a constitutionally-based "right to live," before moving to the demise of that strategy and poverty lawyers' subsequent assessment of more effective ways to practice law for poor people.

This paper was originally written as a speech for a conference on “access to justice” in which participants attempted to describe and assess legal aid and related systems in a number of countries. It takes account of problems and progress in the evolution of subsidized legal services to the poor in the United States.

Prepared for the International Legal Aid Group (ILAG). The 2017 update is based on the National Report for the United States prepared for the ILAG. This report, an update to previous national reports, covers the period from July of 2015 through December of 2017. The report is divided into two parts: civil legal aid and access to justice. The Appendix is a background report that includes more details about the US system. The 2015 update also consists of two parts: Part I is an update to previous national reports covering the period from June of 2013 through December of 2015. Part II is a longer Background Part that includes details about the U.S. system.

A brief overview of the history of legal services for the poor in Virginia.

This article offers a counter narrative to the conventional description of legal aid in the United States. By offering this counter narrative it focuses on certain enduring difficulties that any legal aid or legal services program has to face if it wants to engage in reform efforts: problems of funding and problems of the social and historical context.

Organizations providing free civil legal services to the poor are ubiquitous across the United States. They are so much part of the modern legal landscape that it is surprising that little historical scholarship exists on such organizations. The history of the development of legal aid is also very much a story about gender, race, professionalization, the development of the welfare state, and ultimately its slow dismantlement.

Center for Law & Social Policy (CLASP) created this brief history of civil legal assistance for the low-income community in the United States discusses, from its privately funded beginnings, through its achievement of federal funding, to its expansion and growth into a national program operating throughout the United States, Puerto Rico, and former U.S. territories in the South Pacific. It also describes some of the political battles that have been fought around the legal services program and the restrictions that have come with government funding, and the future of the field. It is based on the previous written work of Justice Earl Johnson, Justice John Dooley, Martha Bergmark, and the authors.

This essay deals with the history of access to justice–chiefly civil justice–and with the role of lawyers and organized legal professions in promoting and restricting that access. In the last century, legal professionals and others have taken small steps to provide access to legal processes and legal advice to people who could not otherwise afford them. By doing so, they have inched closer to the ideals of universal justice.

This essay is a reflection upon the history of federal efforts in the field, eight years after the federal government first began providing legal services to the poor. The program has resulted in an unparalleled availability of legal assistance to those who previously had been unable to afford such services.' Yet the program has also raised profound questions about the responsibilities of attorneys to their clients, to their profession, and to the society in which they live and work.