Ibn Arabi- I believe in the Religion of love ابن عربي - أدين بدين الحب.wmv

"My heart has become a receptacle of every form;
it is a pasture for gazelles and a convent for Christian monks,
and a temple for idols, and pilgrims' kaba,
and the tablets of the torah, and the book of the Koran.
I follow the religion of love, whichever way its camels take.
For this is my religion and my faith." (translated by A.E. Affifi)

-- Ibn Arabi

Homelessiness in an American Town - Last of a Three Part Series

NO VISITORS - TRESPASSERS WILL BE PROSECUTED

Visitors at the facilities for homeless families often are restricted as to where and when they may visit residents. In some cases, visitors may not go beyond a visitors’ room near the entrance; at other facilities, residents are forbidden to have overnight visitors; and at some, visitors have been excluded entirely. For example, at one facility, the entrance to the driveway resembles a military installation. One must wait for the resident to come down the hill to the gatehouse; then the visit is limited to meeting with the resident in a public room adjacent to the gatehouse.

There was a motel, actually a former summer resort, where the management prohibited residents from having visitors after 10 p.m. and required that residents submit to searches of their cottages at any time of the day or night. Defendants advised residents of the motel that "...all visitors must leave the property by 10 PM. Anyone discovered on motel property after 10 PM will be turned over to the police...."

In order to enforce the visitor policy, the motel security guards would search the living quarters of residents after 10:00 p.m. and turn “illegal” visitors over to state police agents for criminal prosecution. The searches were conducted from shortly after 10 p.m. to as late as 2:30 a.m. When the security guards come to the door they announce that they are present to conduct a "bedcheck," an "occupancy check" or a "census check." There are usually two guards, one of whom makes a search of the premises, which often includes the closets, cabinets, drawers and refrigerator as well as the bathroom and bedrooms. The other guard remains outside with an attack dog, with the front door open. Oftentimes, children are awakened in the middle of the night by the beam of in their faces. Occasionally, a guard dog has entered a room and jumped up on a child’s bed.

HOPELESS CORNERS, N.Y.

The call came in to the Hopeless Motel reception desk at 2:45 p.m., a bomb would go off at precisely 3:30 - “Get them homeless out of there,” was the only further statement of the caller; there was no bomb, but because the caller had first asked for room 308, a family found itself summarily dispossessed the next morning. It didn’t matter to the management that Barbara Rackman was a victim of spouse abuse, nor that it was almost certainly her husband who had made the call, deliberately to make trouble for her. He had been sued by DSS for failing to support his child and had beaten Barbara and had threatened their child when she had told DSS his whereabouts and signed affidavits against him for DSS to use in Family Court. The management was concerned only that trouble was brewing, and there was enough of that already in the letters to the management and the local newspaper. Ms. Rackman was ordered out the following morning.

So now, for Barbara Rackman and her seven year old daughter Debra, it was back to DSS and on to another motel in another town, on another highway, in another non-neighborhood, amidst fast food restaurants, automobile sales rooms, automobile fumes, bags of clothing and more bags. Again, as in the case of the Roberts family, the families at the Red Apple Motel, hike along a busy corridor to shop for food, pushing baby carriages and trailing youngsters for whom there is no playground other than a shopping center. A single motel room often functions as a permanent home for a family of four. Is it any wonder that one official who inspected this motel’s numerous rooms devoted to homeless families, "the rooms look like refugee tents."

With only a parking lot for a playground, Barbara and Debra faced a summer of heat and boredom. Barbara’s search for a place to live produced nothing but responses of “No welfare” and an occasional offer of an apartment at a rent far beyond what DSS allows. Barbara counted the days until school would start and give Debra a break from the boredom and chaos of the homeless section of the Red Apple. Registration Day finally arrived. Barbara and Debra arrived a little before 8:30 a.m. at the front door of the Benton McIntyre Elementary School on Monday September 4th. Barbara expected no difficulty, after all, there had been no problem when she registered Debra in school in Hopeless Corners. Debra had had a pretty good year there, so why shouldn’t she be able to adjust and do just as well in this new school district.

Mother and child were not prepared for the cold reception and rejection she received from the staff and then the principal at McIntyre. She was told that the school district did not accept motel children, that she was not a resident of the district and so, her child could not attend without payment of the tuition. Debra and her mother returned to their room only with the suggestion that they ask DSS to transport Debra back to her previous school district. DSS agreed to provide transportation, but despite the pleading of Barbara and her DSS caseworker, the previous school district also refused to accept Debra, saying that she was no longer a resident of the district and could not attend without payment of tuition.

Barbara appealed to the state commissioner of education, who issued a temporary emergency order directing the McIntyre school district to admit the child. The following summer, the commissioner issued a regulation which he hoped would solve the homeless problem, directing that homeless children have a choice of continuing in the school where they became homeless or attending school near in the district where the motel or shelter is located. For Debra, this worked out well, but for many children living in motels far distant from their old schools and friends, it has meant a ride of an hour or even two hours by taxi or special bus each way, thus excluding all after-school activities.
NB: All names used in this series of fiction are fictitious and any resemblance to the names of living persons is not intended.

Pray for a Resolution to the Crisis in Japan

Kennin-ji Temple, Kyoto

Homelessness (ficton based on actual cases) - Part 2

No, the Roberts hadn’t given the motel manager, Kenberg, any reason to call their caseworker at the department of social services, not for over a year, but on their way to their room an onion dropped unnoticed in the hallway and a security guard found it on his 6 p.m. tour of the halls. He sniffed at each door on the floor, and coming upon a telltale odor of frying onions, he knocked hard, then waited only a moment before bursting in, so the family would not be able to hide the evidence. Ben waved to his boys to stash the plates under the bed. A mad scramble ensued but was not fast enough. The frying pan stuffed under the bed did nothing to hide the smoke and smell of the onions and hamburger. “Too late, Roberts, we been watching you, your kids dropped an onion in the hall, your all history here, tomorrow morning, your outta here. Now give me the stuff, your pan, your hot plate, you can go to jail, you know for cooking here.” “My kids gotta eat, don’t they, they gotta eat....” Don’t you cook for your kids?” “Speak to Mr. Kenberg in the morning, first thing in the morning, I got my orders, nothin’ I can do ‘bout it;” the door closed.

“Dad? What about school tomorrow? We gonna miss school again like when got homeless? I got a test in geometry.” Don’t worry, Mark, just go on to school like nothin’s wrong. I’m gonna speak to the manager in the morning, maybe he’ll let us stay, he’s got to.” “Can we eat the burgers, Dad, or are they gonna come back and take them too?” “Take it easy Steve, turn on the TV.”

“Mr. Kenberg, I been here over a year, no fights, no drugs, nothin’. I got three kids in school, all doing good, you can’t kick us out ‘til school’s out, please, I don’t know where they’ll put us, might be far away or back in a hole in Yonkers, I can’t miss work, please, just give me a break, once.” “I can’t keep you, just can’t do it Ben. You and your kids made no trouble here, but I told yah, I told yah lots a times, the town wants me closed down, the fire people are over here every other day looking around to close me down. They don’t want no homeless here. It’s gettin’ hard as hell to run this place. You gotta go, sorry Ben, you gotta get down to welfare right away, with all your stuff, down to welfare this morning. Check-out’s at eleven. I’ll call the worker for you if you want.”

I had to hand it to Roberts, sending me a fax from a neighborhood store was ingenious. He explained later that getting through the host of intake workers at our office was if anything more challenging than getting in to see an emergency worker at the DSS office. It hadn’t always been that way at our shop, but I had to agree, it was so nowadays. Anyway, Roberts’s fax was brought to me without going through ”intake screening,” lucky for him. I asked him how he got our fax number: “Simple, I asked at the police station next door to the welfare office.” Roberts explained that he would lose his job if he had to spend all day at the welfare office. It was already pretty late in the morning when he had arrived there, having to take a bus from the motel all the way to the district office of DSS.

He had called in to his job, but they told him he had already taken off too much time. He said he couldn’t tell them what was going on; he had to get to work by 1 p.m. or he would surely lose the job. He said he had to come down to welfare almost once a month for some damn thing and often had to spend the whole day, the usual story. He just couldn’t do so today. Yet, he had no place to sleep that night, and welfare was getting on his case for having gotten himself evicted from the motel. Apparently, they were letting motel and hotel evictees sit around until they finished with new applicants with emergency problems and newly homeless families that had just been evicted from “permanent” housing. A caseworker who did an initial intake on Roberts told him that she didn’t know but what he would be given low priority and placed out-of-county because he had gotten himself into trouble by violating the “no cooking” rule.

When I called the supervisor, Ms. Bonloch to stress my client’s need to stay in the area in order to retain his employment, her response was a curt refusal to interfere with the worker’s judgment call. Her view was that there were more deserving people for the limited slots available in-county. My only hope of getting him accommodations reasonably near his job was to act boldly and quickly. I sent a fax to the district director stating that out-of-county placement was not only arbitrary in the circumstances of this case, it would be contrary to the policy of the State DSS, which mandates emergency placements in or as near as possible to the homeless family's original residence. I then told Roberts to call me again in a half hour if he hadn’t been given a new placement within commuting distance to his job. I got no further call from him that day.

When Ben Roberts did call me back, three days later, he said the DSS worker had given him an “emergency apartment” in a town that is close enough for him to get to work by bus. Ben Roberts said he and the boys were very happy with their new place with its kitchen and two bedrooms. He thanked me for my intervention and said he was sure that if I hadn’t been involved, he would have been sent far away. He then told me that he had received a notice of reduction of his grant from DSS. I suggested where a fax could be sent to me at no cost, and a few hours later, I found Roberts’ reduction notice in my mailbox.

On its face, the reduction notice was routine and correct, simply adjusting the amount of public assistance to reflect Roberts’ recent pay increase, which he had duly reported. The facts stated in the notice were correct, the math was correct, and the regulations called for the result: Roberts was being asked to make a monthly payment for his apartment that exceeded his entire net take-home pay of 1143.32 a month. The absurdity of Roberts’ situation struck me as comical. I stared at the paper for some time before filling out a form request for a fair hearing to send to the State DSS. I faxed the request as it was the last day to do so to keep the grant unreduced pending a decision after a “fair hearing.”

In preparing for the hearing, I wanted to see this apartment for which my client was being billed $1239.58 a month. Ben Roberts’ broad smile didn’t square with what I viewed on entering his new place, but I understood full well that almost anything beats living in a single motel room with three children for over a year. The apartment turned out to have two small bedrooms; the refrigerator door was broken, two of four burners and the oven were inoperable, the paint was badly peeling from the walls and a huge colony of cockroaches crawled the walls even in daylight. The intercom didn’t work, there was no smoke alarm, the lock on the front door to the building hung down by one loose screw and the mailboxes were in bad shape. Those were the most obvious problems. This was supposed to be a model emergency apartment sponsored by DSS and one of the many do-good non-profit organizations set up supposedly to assist homeless families.

I asked Ben if he had been given any choice of where he would be staying, “No,” he was not asked or shown the apartment in advance. He was assigned to live there. While I was in the building, I asked Mr. Roberts to take me around to find out what some of the other tenants were paying for similar apartments. Our inquiries disclosed that comparable apartment were renting for $750 to $850 a month, some in better condition than his. I asked Roberts for the paper he signed when he took possession of the apartment; it turned out to be something called a “license,” a document which explicitly told Roberts that he had none of the rights of a tenant, but did have the duty to pay for his accommodations. When Roberts complained to the Building Inspector about the conditions in his apartment, he was told that the inspectors do not inspect premises leased under the DSS emergency assistance program - that DSS was responsible for ensuring compliance with the housing code.

At the hearing, to which Ben invited the press, we argued that the demand that Roberts pay over $1200 a month for an apartment such poor condition is unconscionable, that the license agreement is unconscionable and an attempt to evade the landlord’s responsibilities to provide a habitable apartment, that Roberts was being gouged for rent far above that which other tenants were paying and finally, we demonstrated the impossibility of what DSS was asking him to pay. There never was a decision after this hearing, for the matter became moot when a civic organization found an apartment which the Roberts family was able to afford - as a direct result of the publicity engendered by the hearing.

TRESPASSING AT HOME

While I was visiting the building with Ben that day, one of the other residents of the “emergency” apartments asked me for help to stop his summary eviction. It seems he received a paper under his door the day before telling him to be out of the building by 5 p.m. the same day. He had not done so, and a security guard had come the night before threatening him with arrest for trespassing if he didn’t get out immediately.

Another occupant of the building, a Ms. Thomas stopped me to complain about drug pushers in the hallways. She told me that one of the dealers, who does not live in her building had knocked her down and cut her with a knife because she made a remark to him that he should leave her kids alone. For this, she is to be evicted immediately, without benefit of legal notice and a proceeding in housing court. Building security had reported to Social Services that Ms. Thomas was seen “fighting with other residents” in the hallway. I called the main office of the non-profit organization which operated the apartment under contract with the owner and DSS. A “housing supervisor” informed me that since my client was not a tenant, but was living in the emergency apartment as though it were a hotel room, she could be evicted without going to court and would be arrested if she did not leave by 5 p.m. I sent a fax to the head of the organization stating that my client had a right to remain in the apartment pending judicial proceedings.

The following day, Ms. Thomas called to say she had received a ten-day notice to leave the apartment or judicial proceedings would be commenced to evict her. She was subsequently served with court papers claiming only that she had been given notice; no reason was stated, no allegation was made that she had performed any wrongful act. Such was the “New Public Housing,” where due process no longer protects one’s occupancy.

Grosvenor Arche-Largest Double Arch

Let's go to the canyon,
Over slickrock, under arches;
Walk among the pinon.

Homelessness and Poverty In An American Town

(a fictional account based on actual cases with names changed) - Part I in a series

In March, 1987, Ben Roberts and his three children, aged 13, 15 and 17 were evicted from a Section 8 apartment because Ben was not there when a worker from the Section 8 office came to inspect the apartment. He had called the housing office at 8:30 a.m. to say he wouldn’t be at his apartment due to an emergency hospitalization of his youngest boy with a bad asthma attack. A clerk promised to relay the message to the worker when she came in. Nevertheless, Roberts’ government housing subsidy was terminated, and he was subsequently evicted for non-payment of rent. He had had no knowledge that a free lawyer might be available to him and no notice that he had a right to a hearing before the termination of his rent assistance for alleged “non-cooperation.” After the eviction, Roberts lost his job as a school custodian in large part due to the many hours he had spent at the welfare office to get his family “placed” in emergency housing. He also suspected that his supervisor did not want a “homeless” man working at the school. The Roberts family was “placed” by the welfare department in a motel in a town some 25 miles distant. After three and a half months of searching for a job and an apartment, Roberts found work in as a maintenance man in a hospital. Roberts remained in a motel, because without housing assistance, his income was insufficient to enable him to rent an apartment. He would need at least two bedrooms, and in his search, he found nothing for less than $800 a month, and very little below $950 a month.

The kids used to be pretty happy about getting out of school, especially as the days lengthened. Play time now doesn’t exist for them, neither can they go out for a team, rehearse for the school drama or even get some extra help. If they come home by taxi, like the other motel kids, they must leave at once, the taxis don’t wait for extra curricular activities. Anyway, they don’t like the other kids seeing them get into those taxi, and the drivers can be pretty nasty. The Roberts boys take the public bus back home. It’s a good hour or more, but at least they have that option. Many children do not have a choice, living in motels fifty miles to the north. For those placed in out-of-county motels, it’s an hour or an hour and a half by taxi each way to school. Younger kids often fall asleep in class.

The boys get off the bus near a Grand Union; with no refrigerator at home, they shop often. From there, it’s a good half hour walk alongside the stream of traffic to get back to the motel room. They hate that walk, there’s no sidewalk, not much shoulder and no way to get off the road in some stretches. They pass mothers driving baby carriages as they go, but it’s the honking that infuriates them, gets to them the most, more than the dirt and fumes and squeezing by baby carriages. When they approach the motel in late afternoon sunlight, the grocery bags have to be hidden in a nearby culvert until dark, as though they were contraband. It used to terrify Mark to bring the bags into the motel after dark. In time, he got to think nothing of it; they had a system down pat with Benny keeping lookout for the security guard. You could always lie about what you had, say it was deli or cereal, milk whatever. But people were forever getting caught cooking and getting kicked out, “replaced,” they call it. So far, the Roberts had not been replaced. (To be continued)

JFK Library and Museum

Intercultural Dimensions at the Harvard Model UN Conference

Janet the ID table.

Tulip in Boston

Graduation at SingSing Prison, Ossining, NY

I'm glad to see that educational programming has been re-instated. http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/07/nyregion/07towns.html
I have a lot of respect for the inmates in the college program at SingSing. In the law courses I taught there, I found the students more responsive and interesting than in the classes I taught at a law school.

The “New Vision” of Legal Services

In 1971, we asked a federal court to prevent municipal officials from demolishing a building as a part of the city's urban renewal program. Our complaint was that the government was destroying housing without assuring the tenants of adequate, safe relocation housing and moving expenses. The case was brought as a nation-wide class action, a form of action which provides relief to all the unnamed members of the class and which, previous to the inception of the Legal Services program had rarely, if ever, been used on behalf of poor people. The judge gave us a lecture about politics and the judiciary. Suddenly, he turned to me and asked, "Are you lawyers legal aid or are you that new fangled thing they have?"

The judge was curious about us because prior to the establishment of Legal Services as a part of the War on Poverty in the 1960s, legal aid had had a "charity" perspective of helping poor people with legal matters. This entailed writing a letter or negotiating to assist a poor person but rarely litigating a matter affirmatively. With the establishment of the Legal Services program as part of the Office of Economic Opportunity in the mid-1960s, the Government began funding an agency with a broad mandate to use all of the tools available to lawyers. Besides litigation and lobbying, Legal Services attorneys were encouraged to educate poor people about their rights and to assist them in organizing action groups such as tenants' unions and associations of consumers, prisoners and welfare recipients. And, poverty law became a career option rather than merely a way for new lawyers to learn the ropes.

Lawsuits were encouraged and supported financially to correct many systemic wrongs, such as housing and school segregation, disparities in municipal services, police brutality and inhuman prison conditions. Farmers and corporations which hired migrant laborers came under legal attack. Landlords for the first time were considered merchants of services rather than as lords of the manor. Government agencies that dispense benefits were told by the courts that what they considered generous gifts were property interests to which poor people could claim entitlement and from which recipients could be dispossessed only with elaborate procedural protections.

The theory that welfare benefits should be treated as a property interest under the due process clause of the Constitution was proposed by Charles A. Reich in "The New Property," [73 Yale L. J. 733 (1964)]. The tenor of the times, that welfare could be a constructive force in people's lives, is reflected also in Reich's article "Individual Rights and Social Welfare: The Emerging Legal Issues," [74 Yale L. J. 1245, 1257 (1965)], where Professor Reich writes, "[i]n a constructive alliance of law and social welfare there lies hope for a fundamental change in the status of the disadvantaged in our society - a bill of rights for the disinherited." Indeed, in Goldberg v. Kelly, 397 U.S. 254, 265 (1970), a landmark welfare and due process case, Justice William Brennan, stated:

"Welfare, by meeting the basic demands of subsistence, can help bring within the reach of the poor the same opportunities that are available to others to participate meaningfully in the life of the community... Public assistance, then, is not mere charity, but a means to "promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity...."

Governmental agencies and corporations have a great advantage if they can give a litigant what he's asking for and then go on doing the same wrong to hundreds or thousands of other people. So, when poor people's lawyers began bringing class action lawsuits challenging the wrongful conduct of government administrators and corporations, Legal Services' clients were empowered to obtain relief not only for themselves but for others as well. The class action saved many cases from dismissal as moot, and it obtained community-wide, state-wide and nation-wide remedies against many wrongful policies. And where lawsuits were not altogether successful in accomplishing the goals of poor clients, there was legislative and administrative advocacy. Legal Services attorneys were often successful in persuading legislators to change the rules to provide relief from unfair situations which were not amenable to solution by litigation.

Additionally, the Legal Services program encouraged its staff attorneys to get together and stratagize in regional and national conferences. There were national back-up centers to help with sophisticated research and co-counseling of large litigation. There was money available for expert witnesses and other litigation expenses. The attorneys, in turn, helped organize people in their communities and provided people with information about their rights concerning health and welfare, landlord-tenant law and consumer law, to name a few areas of Legal Services practice.

Examples of How This Worked:

1. Seeking Decent Housing With The People's Housing Movement

The People's Housing Movement was a joint project of a local Community Action Program and a Legal Services branch office which involved every aspect of Legal Services work as it was understood in the late 1960s - grass roots organizing and lobbying, welfare rights, community legal education, legislative and administrative advocacy, individual and group representation and class action federal litigation. The issues involved slum housing, an urban renewal agency's land use decisions and an agreement between a city and a private developer to exclude welfare recipients from a newly constructed moderate income housing development.

2. Protecting The Privacy Of Homeless Families With A Class Action

This case involved a former summer colony converted for use as a shelter for homeless families. Security guards at this facility would search the cottages from 10:00 p.m. until 2:30 a.m. One guard would search the closets, cabinets, drawers, bathroom and bedrooms while the other remained outside with a guard dog. Children were awakened in the middle of the night and sometimes the dog entered as well and jumped up on a child's bed. If an unauthorized person were found, he would be detained and the family would be summarily expelled from its cottage. The problem called for interviewing many families, informing them of their rights in the circumstances, holding meetings of the tenants, and bringing a class action to terminate the abusive conduct of the owner.

Over the years from 1981 to 1995, Legal Services' funding was cut by 25%, and by 1995, the poor were served by one-third fewer attorneys than in 1981. Then, in 1996, many more Legal Services staff were laid off or quit when Congress cut the program an additional 30% and eliminated all funding for the national back-up centers. The reduction in funding is only one aspect of the degradation of Legal Services for the poor. During the 1980s much of the funding for Legal Services offices no longer came from the national government, but instead, it came more and more from state and local government agencies. The increase in local funding led to greater political control of Legal Services programs. State and local agencies decided whom Legal Services attorneys serve, what work they did and, in some instances, they determined who may be sued with their money. Moreover, there was an intensification of management and bar association control over staff, closure of neighborhood offices, mounting pressure to increase the number of cases opened and closed each year and reluctance to expend money and time on impact litigation.

Here is an example of interference by a funding source. A person who oversees a government funded program made these statements at a meeting with Legal Services advocates:

"Load up on technical assistance, information referral and education. They want to see a lot of numbers. Train as many as you want just don't advocate. There aren't a lot of court cases, we're not aggravating a lot of people."

This official also informed the advocates that the state agency did not want Legal Services attorneys to appear at administrative hearings where they would be in an adversarial position to county officials.

A second example: beginning in the late 1980s, eviction prevention grants from the State Department of Social Services were conditioned on the agreement of a Legal Services office not to sue the state or county Social Services departments with any of the grant funds. Consider also a letter written by an experienced Legal Services attorney to an Assistant Attorney General:

"When Ms. X. went to court she told us she asked about the repairs and the landlord replied he would only repair when she vacated. That needs to be challenged but this office lacks the resources to do it. The best we can do is try to locate suitable housing for our clients."

The 1990s brought a so-called "new vision" to the Legal Services Program. The new policies imposed massive restrictions on what Legal Services attorneys may do for their clients. The restrictions imposed by Congress in 1996, I believe, cut the heart out of the Legal Services program. I will briefly outline them:

No Class Actions [45 Code of Federal Regulations (C.F.R.) Part 1617]

Without class actions, many poor people who are injured by an unlawful practice remain without a remedy. High impact lawsuits are at risk of dismissal when defendants seek to moot the issues presented by giving relief immediately to the person or persons who bring the law suit. By doing so, defendants often seek to continue their illegal conduct with respect to people other than those who brought suit. By immediately giving relief to one or several wronged individuals, defendants reap the benefits and advantages of continuing their illegal conduct with respect to hundreds or thousands of other people. Class actions often avoid this obstacle to justice.

No In-Person Solicitation, No Training Programs Advocating a Particular Public Policy and No Grass Roots Lobbying (45 C.F.R. Parts 1612 and 1638)

In developing cases attacking illegal policies and practices, it is essential for the Legal Services lawyer to solicit clients by, for example, handing out flyers at welfare centers and at other public locations where poor persons are likely to be found and then speaking directly with potential clients concerning their rights. Without in-person informational sessions and on the spot solicitation of clients, much illegal conduct will remain unchallenged. These regulations also prohibit Legal Services attorneys from advocating for particular public policies.

No Legislative Lobbying and No Advocacy to Change Administrative Policies (45 C.F.R. Part 1612)

Much of the work of Legal Services attorneys involves persuading government administrators to alter policies and practices so as to conform their policies to constitutional and statutory requirements. Since advocacy concerning administrative policies is now prohibited, Legal Services attorneys have to rely on litigation to provide protection of the rights of their clients. But Legal Services attorneys are unable to bear such a burden of litigation and the poor suffer the consequences. Moreover, there are laws and polices which injure poor people which are not amenable to solution in the courts, but which might be altered through legislative lobbying by lawyers and by grass roots lobbying.

No Claims for Statutory Attorney's Fees (45 C.F.R. Part 1642)

In addition to denying Legal Services organizations the funds they desperately need to function after the reductions of the past 25 years, this prohibition turns Legal Services attorneys into second class lawyers. They are deprived of an important tool with which to negotiate for the best settlements in lawsuits where a statute gives the prevailing party a right to an award of attorney's fees. The prospect of having to pay substantial attorney's fees is a strong incentive for a defendant to agree to terminate an illegal practice early in a lawsuit rather than to play it out and continue the unlawful conduct as long as possible. A former Legal Services attorney, David S. Udell, gives a devastating example of the effects of this prohibition in "The Legal Services Restrictions: Lawyers in Florida, New York, Virginia and Oregon Describe the Costs," [17 Yale Law and Policy L. Rev. 337, 360 (1998)]. After the Government prohibited Legal Services attorneys from seeking fees, a housing authority brought a frivolous eviction case against a family based on a bogus claim of criminal conduct by the mother. A Legal Services attorney obtained a dismissal of the case, but the lawyer could not seek an attorney's fee even though it was available in principle. The authority brought the same claim a second time and the Legal Services lawyer obtained a second dismissal. Unfortunately, the third time the housing authority sought the family's eviction on the same unfounded basis, the Legal Services office was not available and the family was evicted. Had the attorney's fee restriction not been in effect when Legal Services did represent the family, the housing authority likely would have been required to pay fees to Legal Services. The threat of additional fees most likely would have prevented further harassment of the family.

No Representation of Illegal Aliens (45 C.F.R. Part 1626)

Illegal aliens are entitled to the equal protection of the laws, and they should have lawyers to enforce their rights. Citizen children of illegal aliens may find themselves homeless or without food and clothing because this prohibition cuts off legal assistance to their parents.

No Representation of Prisoners (45 C.F.R. Part 1637)

Prisoners, too, are entitled to the equal protection of the laws and to access to the courts. The prohibition on representing prisoners applies not only to claims concerning the conditions of confinement but to all claims and defenses, including those in domestic relations, consumer and landlord-tenant cases. Thus, if a client is merely arrested and jailed while an eviction proceeding is pending, the Legal Services attorney cannot defend the client in housing court.

No Representation In Eviction Proceedings Brought By A Public Housing Authority Against A Person Accused Of Certain Drug Offenses (45 C.F.R. Part 1633)

Under this restriction, a public housing tenant who has been charged with drug-related conduct is precluded from being represented by a Legal Services attorney regardless of the merits of the accusation.

No Welfare Reform Cases (45 C.F.R. Part 1639)

Litigation to secure subsistence income for poor people lies close to the heart of the mission of Legal Services. The restriction on challenging welfare rules and policies was invalidated by the U.S. Supreme Court in 2001 on first amendment grounds.

I fear we have gone a long way back to the legal aid of earlier times. John McKay, a recent president of the Legal Services Corporation has written about a "new vision" for Legal Services. "Federally Funded Legal Services: a New Vision of Equal Justice Under Law." Tennessee Law Review 68 (2000) pp. 101–18.Mr. McKay embraces the 1996 restrictions and urges that:

"Taken as a whole, the restrictions on the types of cases LSC programs are allowed to handle convey a strong Congressional message: federally funded legal services should focus on individual case representation by providing access to the justice system on a case-by-case basis. Therein lies the key to bipartisan support and the future of federally sponsored legal services."

I cannot agree with this concept of a "New Vision" of legal assistance to poor people in America. The prevailing view of the federal government seems to be that individualized service - handling a poor person's everyday problem - and seeking reforms of systems which injure groups of similarly situated poor people are mutually exclusive alternatives. They are not; they never have been. Indeed, I do not believe that there really is a new vision of Legal Services for the poor. What some call a new vision strikes me as little other than the same myopic vision that opposed zealous and thorough representation of poor people throughout its history.

Moreover, in recent years, there has been an increasing emphasis on counting numbers of cases and giving poor people pieces of legal help rather than full service. Thus, we see increasing resources devoted to brief service, advice, referrals, internet-based information and assisted pro se litigation. While these components of legal assistance can play a useful role, today, systemic injustices, such as segregated housing, due process deficiencies in agency procedures and environmental hazards impacting poor neighborhoods are not likely to be addressed often by lawyers associated with that "new fangled thing."

Indian paintbrush

Breakfast Torte

To make this dish I had to get up so early, but it was worth the effort.

Let's Have Fun

Here's to happiness!