and the Role of Counsel for the Poor."
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BOOK NOTES:
brief reviews of books on the NEJL shelves Frequently, the National Equal Justice
Library acquires books which we suspect may not have come to the
attention of lawyers and others interested in the subject of equal
access to justice, even though these books appear of considerable
relevance to this field. Often
they are books in the social sciences or published in other countries.
This “Book Notes” column features such books and provides brief
reviews summarizing the contents and what readers might gain from
the publication. Incidentally,
most if not all of the books discussed below, even those published
many years ago, can be purchased through http://www.amazon.com or
http://www.barnesandnoble.com. Susan
E. Lawrence, The Poor in Court: The Legal Services Program and Supreme Court Decision
Making (Princeton University Press, 3175 Princeton
Pike, Lawrenceville, NJ 08648,
published 1990, 159 pages, plus notes and appendices.) This book earned the author, now a professor of political science at Rutgers, the 1986 American Political Science Association’s award for best dissertation in Public Law. It reports and analyzes the eighty cases legal services lawyers argued in the Supreme Court from 1966-74, representing seven percent of the court’s written decision during that period. Professor Lawrence reports the legal services lawyers won almost two-thirds of their cases in the high court, many of which had far-rangin impact on the lives of the poor, and concludes those cases also “were influential inshaping the course of judicial policy development,” particularly the high court’s evolving theories on equal protection and due process. After
an extensive review of the OEO Legal Services Program and the other
efforts of the lawyers it funded, as well as the cases brought to
the Supreme Court, Lawrence also makes another finding.
“Contrary to the views of some critics, the LSP’s appellate
litigation was not a separate enterprise analogous to interest group
litigation, but an extension of the Program’s client service.”
The
Poor in Court is a thoroughly researched, well-written
and objective empirical study of an important facet of legal services
work, seeking justice in the appellate courts when it can’t be won
in the trial courts. The
book is filled with tables and charts and comparisons which make interesting
reading in themselves, as they analyze these eighty cases from several
perspectives. While published a decade ago, and covering cases
decided over a quarter century ago, this book describes a history
and analyzes issues which are just as relevant today as they were
in the 1960’s and 1970’s.
Martha Davis, Brutal Need: Legal Services and the Welfare Rights Movement (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1993) 187 pages. During the late 1960’s and early 1970’s Edward Sparer and a number of legal services lawyers brought law and order to an arbitrary welfare system, requiring administrators to obey the Constitution and federal law. This excellent book documents these largely successful efforts as well as Sparer’s ultimately unsuccessful attempt to go further and establish a constitutional right to welfare. Ms. Davis also describes the backdrop against which all legal representation of welfare recipients proceeded during this era – a very active network of community-based welfare rights organizations with their own ambitious agendas. The author, a lawyer with the NAACP, researched the subject for several years with foundation funding. She candidly assesses the wins and losses, the wise decisions and the not-so-wise, by both legal services lawyers and the welfare rights organizations. This book conveys useful information and supplies important lessons for lawyers and others confronting the present, very different welfare environment. Melissa Fay Greene, Praying for
Sheetrock (Ballantine,
1991)
The first
Reginald Heber Smith Book Awards were presented at the Reunion banquet for the
Reginald Heber Smith Fellows by Jay Urwitz, a partner in the prominent Boston
law firm, Hale and Dorr, where Mr Smith worked for over 40 years after leaving
the Boston Legal Aid Society. In
giving Melissa Fay Greene the award for her book, Urwitz read the explanation
the independent Smith-Cahn Award Committee had given for choosing this book
for one of the two Smith Book Awards.
“Praying
for Sheetrock is an unusual book. Although Melissa Greene deals
with a familiar theme -- the challenge of using the law to secure rights for
poor people in an unreceptive environment -- the story is fresh, powerful,
uplifting and tragic, and is extraordinarily well told.
The author carefully intermeshes the flow of events with character
development. The result is engaging and suspenseful. Presented throughout is the spirit, tenacity and vitality of
poverty law lawyers. Perhaps uniquely so, Praying
for Sheetrock reveals both the importance of law to the poor and
the complexity and unpredictability of achieving social change through legal
action.”
For the reasons highlighted by the awards committee this book provides a marvelous introduction to the legal services field for those who know nothing about the subject. At the same time, it offers valuable insights for even the most experienced poverty lawyer. Most “Book Notes” feature books about legal services and indigent defense in the United States. But as demonstrated by its International Legal Aid Collection the National Equal Justice Library recognizes the United States has much to learn from the rest of the world. In fact, at present there is a far larger scholarly community outside the U.S. focused primarily on issues involving the organization, financing, and delivery of legal services than is found in this country. Below we briefly discuss the most recent in a series produced by members of the Legal Aid and Legal Services Group of the International Sociological Association. This group includes over twenty-five legal aid scholars from more than a dozen countries on four continents. It holds an international conference once a year, the most recent this past June in Vancouver, British Columbia, and frequently includes administrators of legal aid programs in those meetings.
Francis Regan, Alan
Paterson, Tamara Goriely & Don Fleming, The
Transformation of Legal Aid: Comparative and Historical Studies (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 1999) 305 pgs. The four named editors who also wrote chapters for the book were joined by another nine scholars to produce a thought-provoking series of studies examining how legal aid is faring among the industrial democracies as we enter a new century. The authors come from Australia, Canada, Ireland, the Netherlands, Norway, Scotland, and the United States. But they write about and compare legal aid systems in another dozen countries as well.
Different
chapters address such provocative topics as why legal aid services vary
between societies; why legal services spending in the U.S. has lagged so far
behind the explosive expansion experienced in so many other countries; how the
composition of the legal aid caseload is affected by the structure of welfare
and government institutions in a given country; why European countries, all
subject to a right to counsel in criminal cases, demonstrate such wide
variations in their expenditure levels on indigent criminal defense; the
political conflict that arises under “judicare” systems between the
private bar and government budget managers over the size of the legal aid
appropriation; conceptual issues and practical problems in measuring the need
for legal services and gauging the quality of the services rendered; and, what
is the proper role of government-funded legal aid in providing representation
for poor people in “multi-party” cases.
This book is filled with information and insights of great value not only to U.S. scholars but to legal aid policymakers and administrators, in the U.S. or any country. Fortunately, it is written in a readable style that is easily accessible to this broader audience.
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