Justice Library Fights for Cause Under Siege

Listing the happiest moments in his life, Judge Earl Johnson Jr. of the California Court of Appeal mentions the obvious: his wedding day, the birth of his children. And then there’s the recent opening of the National Equal Justice Library.

The library was Johnson’s brainchild. After the 1989 death of a friend who decades ago joined Johnson in the national movement to ensure proper legal defense for the poor, the judge decided it was time to document and honor this effort.

“So I suggested that we set up some kind of library to begin collecting and preserving both the oral recollections of people and the correspondence and other papers that reflected that history,” Johnson recalled.

Occupying five rooms in the Washington College of Law at American University, the library is a tribute to those who have pushed to expand legal representation to people who cannot afford it.

But Johnson and the others who helped make the library a reality also hope it will rally support for the legal aid cause at a time when it has come under political attack from conservatives, who question the government’s responsibility in helping provide this service.

The library is the only center in the nation devoted specifically to the study of the legal aid and public defender movements, said Danna Bell-Russel, a former Washington librarian who serves as its curator.

The shared belief that all people have a right to representation is what drives the various forms of legal assistance available in the United States today, including legal aid, public defender and pro bono services. While legal aid societies provide services to the poor in civil cases, public defenders are lawyers who represent indigents in criminal cases. Pro bono services are provided by private attorneys free of charge.

Johnson, 62, more than 30 years ago was director of the federal Legal Services Program, created to help fund and coordinate the legal aid system nationwide. He is part of a long line of California legal crusaders--a tradition dating back more than a century to Clara Shortridge Foltz, whom Johnson calls “the mother of the public defender movement in this country.”

Foltz had eloped at 15 and lived on a farm in Iowa before following her husband to San Jose and deciding to pursue a legal career. She became the first woman to attend Hastings College of Law in San Francisco. Upon graduation, she was the first woman admitted to the California bar.

She became involved in the women’s suffrage movement and in 1893 began advocating a public defender’s office. Twenty-two years later, the nation’s first such office opened in Los Angeles.

It is those such as Foltz whom Johnson wanted to commemorate when he first shared his library idea with James Neuhard, a public defender in Michigan. Talk spread in an extended circle of friends until the two managed to rally support from several groups, including the American Bar Assn.

Operating on an annual budget of $250,000, the library is funded by charitable groups and individual contributions. But aside from about $400,000 it has received in grants from private foundations, donations have been “spotty,” Bell-Russel said.

If the political cross-fire surrounding the legal aid movement in the 1990s is any sign, getting $2 million the library’s board of directors hopes to raise for its endowment will be a struggle.

According to the National Legal Aid and Defender’s Assn., budget cuts pushed by the Republican-controlled Congress have resulted in a 61% drop in five years in the number of federally funded offices offering civil legal assistance, from 2,369 to 929 now.