Legal Aid for Poor Survives Cyclical Attempts to Kill It : Law: Though now threatened with sharp funding cut, program has persevered and flourished over last 30 years.

Back in the early days of the War on Poverty, Sargent Shriver called up John Sutro, president of the California Bar Assn. Sutro--who later became a supporter of legal aid to the poor--was objecting to the tactics of the fledgling California Rural Legal Assistance.

“Mr. Sutro said to me that these [CRLA] lawyers might be useful to and used by the poor in suits against the growers,” Shriver, President Lyndon B. Johnson’s point man on poverty programs, recalled during a 1971 hearing on the legal assistance program. “And I said, ‘Well, I thought that was . . . the point.’ I said, ‘Look, I’ll make an agreement with you. If you will agree that no lawyers in California will represent the growers, I will agree that no legal service people will represent the pickers.’ And that was the end of the argument.”

From its meager beginnings in 1965, federally funded legal aid for the poor--which has been targeted for severe cuts by Congress this year--has been a lightning rod for the currents of contemporary political debate. But despite the cyclical attempts to kill the program, despite its inclination to raise the anger of conservatives and big business, despite the shrinking federal purse, the history of federal legal aid to the poor since its birth 30 years ago has been one largely of remarkable growth and expansion.

The interim period has seen nothing less than a revolution in legal services for the poor, with spending going from barely $4 million in 1965 for all such programs nationwide to more than $400 million this fiscal year. Moreover, a philosophical tenet--the notion that only the rich have access to the legal system--has been transformed.

The first legal aid program in the nation was created in 1876 by exploited German immigrants in New York. But the roots of the current federal program can be found in Boston attorney Reginald Heber Smith’s groundbreaking 1919 book “Justice and the Poor,” the first comprehensive study of how the poor interact with the American legal system.

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Smith exposed a two-tier system of justice, with vast differences in what was available to the rich and the poor. “The administration of American justice is not impartial, the rich and the poor do not stand on an equality before the law,” Smith wrote.

His book spurred some concern, but the leading lights of American lawyerdom did not rush to embrace his sweeping conclusions.

Nonetheless, four years later, a national legal aid organization was formed and, during the 1920s, 30 new legal aid projects were launched around the country.

The programs were quite modest, though, and well into the 1960s almost all of them depended on charity for sustenance.

Legal aid attorneys were poorly paid, carried heavy caseloads, generally saw a client no more than once and rarely filed an appeal, according to a study done by the Russell Sage Foundation.

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During the early 1960s, though, impetus for vastly enhanced legal assistance for the nation’s indigents developed, spurred in part by the achievements of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, which had gotten school desegregation outlawed by the U.S. Supreme Court in 1954.

In 1964, though, the push for change accelerated, said Wellesley College historian Jerold S. Auerbach. The first federal conference on extending legal services to indigents was held, Congress passed the Economic Opportunity Act and civil rights activists Edgar and Jean Cahn published an influential article on the need for neighborhood law offices in poor areas.

The following year, under the leadership of Shriver, the new Office of Economic Opportunity launched the first federal legal services program, adopting some of the proposals pushed by the Cahns.

The program was “part of the whole Great Society impulse to extend middle-class privileges to poor people who had never had them,” said UCLA historian Robert Dallek, author of “Lone Star Rising,” an acclaimed biography of President Lyndon Johnson. “The idea was to bring people into the mainstream of American life, and what could be more middle class than being able to sue someone and have a lawyer on your side,” Dallek said.

Within the first year, the Office of Economic Opportunity made grants to local programs totaling $20 million--five times the amount that had gone to legal aid in the previous year. In 1965, there were about 400 legal aid lawyers nationwide--one for every 120,000 eligible people, compared with one for every 560 people in the general population. By 1968 the ranks of legal aid lawyers had skyrocketed to 2,000 and the program’s annual budget was $40 million.

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But from the start there also was strident opposition to the program among bar associations around the country. That opposition manifested itself most fiercely in response to the California Rural Legal Assistance, one of the program’s early grantees, which opened its first field office in Madera in August 1966 and soon was operating in agricultural areas throughout the state.

From the start, the group’s attorneys made it clear that they did not intend to run a traditional legal aid program. James D. Lorenz Jr., the organization’s first director, said the program planned to offer its poor clients the same economic, political and social bargaining power available to affluent clients of large private law firms.

The out-front approach to changing the existing social order met with immediate resistance.

Local bar associations, whose leaders generally represented large agricultural interests in the areas where the program set up shop, made it clear that they wanted no part of it. “They told me that they didn’t want us here and would make life very hard for me,” said Robert Gnaizda, the program’s first litigation director, referring to his reception in Salinas.

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Within its first two years, the program won a series of legal victories that gave the organization national stature but intensified its opposition.

In September 1967, legal assistance lawyers obtained an order from U.S. District Judge Robert Peckham in San Jose temporarily restraining the federal Department of Labor from importing Mexican workers in the bracero program. Two months later, the California Supreme Court agreed with legal aid lawyers that Gov. Ronald Reagan should be prohibited from dropping 160,000 indigents from the Medi-Cal health care program.

Soon thereafter, legal aid lawyers won a case that forced California farm owners to pay a minimum wage of $1.65 an hour, the highest in the nation for farm workers at the time. The program also prevailed in suits that required all of California’s 58 counties to adopt some form of government food program and participate in a federal school lunch program for poor children.

Reagan and California’s Republican Sen. George Murphy made numerous attempts to scuttle the legal services program, but they failed. Although the California program prevailed in its fight against political interference, concerned members of the American Bar Assn. and others called for the creation of a separate nonprofit corporation to receive funds from Congress and distribute them to local legal services programs.

Democrats and President Richard Nixon each made counterproposals, and after three years of off-and-on haggling, Nixon signed the Legal Services Corporation Act in July 1974.

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Although the law imposed some new restrictions on legal aid attorneys, the program remained largely intact, outraging some conservatives who had lobbied Nixon not to go along with continuation of the specialized “backup” centers, such as Los Angeles’ Western Center on Law and Poverty, that were involved in many of the major class-action cases.

Nixon resigned within weeks and was replaced by Vice President Gerald Ford, who appointed the first board of the Legal Services Corp. a year later.

Ford was defeated in 1976 by Jimmy Carter, whose presidency saw the greatest period of growth in the Legal Services Corp., the umbrella and funding conduit for legal aid programs nationwide. The corporation’s budget nearly tripled to $325 million, legal aid became available in every congressional district of the United States and the goal of “minimum access”--two lawyers for every 10,000 poor people--was briefly achieved.

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But in January 1981, President Reagan took office and the Legal Services Corp. began a fight for survival.

Reagan slashed its budget 25% his first year in office, leading to the closure of more than 300 legal services offices. Reagan also appointed a number of people to the Legal Services Corp. board who were hostile to the program, leading to political warfare between some of the corporation’s officials and lawyers in the field.

But Reagan was unable to kill the program because his party never gained control of both houses of Congress during his tenure. The Democrats and their Republican allies kept funding the Legal Services Corp., and starting in 1984 funding began to increase again.

The budget continued to rise gradually during the George Bush administration and hit $400 million for the first time a year after Bill Clinton--whose wife, Hillary, chaired the Legal Services Corp. board from 1978 to 1981--was elected president.

After the sweeping Republican victories in 1994, Legal Services Corp. opponents had what they never had before--a majority in both houses of Congress. That turned out to be more important than having a friend in the White House. As one Legal Services Corp. lawyer noted, “Congress controls the purse strings, and you can’t veto a program into existence or veto it into a larger budget.”

So, in 1995 the legal services debate in Congress was over how big the cuts would be or whether the program would be turned over to the states as block grants.

Ultimately, efforts to scrap the program--led by Sen. Phil Gramm (R-Texas)--were rejected as the Senate approved a compromise bill by Sen. Pete Domenici (R-N.M.), which called for a 33% budget cut and major restrictions on what Legal Services Corp. lawyers could do. Faced with no viable alternative, even the staunchest supporters of Legal Services backed Domenici’s plan. “When Pete Domenici becomes the hero of the debate for legal services, you know how far right the debate has moved,” said veteran Los Angeles legal aid lawyer Rod Field.

Clinton has said he opposes the restrictions and slashed funding, but the issue remains tied up in the federal budget deadlock.