Established in 1964, the federal Legal Services Program
(later, Corporation) served a vast group of Americans desperately
in need of legal counsel: the poor. At the program's zenith
in 1981, more than 1,450 offices employing six thousand attorneys
and three thousand paralegals worked to aid those who could
not afford private attorneys. In Rationing Justice,
Kris Shepard looks at this pioneering program's effect on
the Deep South.
A historian as well as a practicing attorney, Shepard conducted
oral interviews with former poverty lawyers and investigated
documents and judicial decisions related to hundreds of cases
in Alabama, Mississippi, and Georgia, tracing widespread social
change over three decades. Before the advent of the legal
services programs, Shepard contends, law was often a weapon
of oppression wielded with singular force against impoverished
southerners, particularly women and African Americans. By
utilizing these legal advocates and processes, the poor made
tangible gains in cases involving federal, state, and local
social programs, low-income housing, consumer rights, domestic
relations, and civil rights. They also confronted the limits
of the American legal and political system in its institutional
and cultural boundaries-including gender and race-and its
limitations of will.
Poverty lawyers, Shepard argues, did not by themselves create
a legal revolution in the South, but they did force southern
politicians, policy makers, businessmen, and law enforcement
officials to recognize that they could not ignore the legal
rights of low-income citizens. Poor southerners too, Shepard
reveals, gained a newfound trust, however tenuous, in the
American legal system. America's legal services program has
survived for four decades, and poverty lawyers have adapted
to ever-changing political realities, including slashed budgets
and severe restrictions on poverty law practice adopted by
the Republican-led Congress of the mid-1990s.
Shepard's narrative of the relationship of poverty lawyers
and their clients, and their interaction with legal, political,
and social structures, speaks poignantly to justice for all
in America.
Kris Shepard is an attorney in private practice
in Charlotte, North Carolina, where he also offers his professional
assistance through the Volunteer Lawyers Program and local
legal services offices. He is the coeditor of A Call to
Conscience: The Landmark Speeches of Dr. Martin Luther King,
Jr.
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