High Court to Tackle Free-Speech Case

The Supreme Court on Monday said that it would decide whether federally funded lawyers for the poor have a free-speech right to challenge the government’s new restrictions on welfare.

The case, to be heard in the fall, renews a long-running fight between advocates for the poor and congressional conservatives.

For the justices, the case also revives a continuing dispute over whether the government can limit the 1st Amendment rights of artists, doctors or lawyers as a condition of their eligibility for federal support.

Since 1974, the government has subsidized lawyers for the poor through the Legal Services Corp. These lawyers do not handle criminal cases, instead they give advice or represent low-income people with problems ranging from divorces and consumer complaints to loss of benefits for disabilities, health care or welfare.

Conservatives in Congress have long complained that the government should not pay lawyers to carry out political agendas. They have argued that lawyers who are subsidized by the government should represent individual clients only and should not be allowed to lobby legislators or go to court to challenge federal and state policies.

When the Republicans took control of Congress in 1995, they threatened to eliminate Legal Services entirely. Instead, in what was billed as a compromise, Congress funded the corporation again but imposed new limits on lawyers. One provision said that Legal Services lawyers could not “participate in any way in litigation, lobbying or rule-making” involving the overhaul of the welfare system.

But no sooner did this restriction become law than it came under challenge in the courts.

New York University law professor Burt Neuborne said that the government should not be allowed to say “we will give poor people half a lawyer. This is a lawyer who can agree with us but cannot disagree with us.”

Neuborne and the Brennan Center for Justice in New York were among several groups who challenged the constraints on lawyers as unconstitutional. He noted that the restriction on attacking the welfare laws applied to all local legal aid chapters who received some federal money, even if most of their funding came from elsewhere.

Last year on a 2-1 vote, the U.S. court of appeals in New York agreed that the restriction violates the 1st Amendment. “It muzzles grant recipients from expressing any and all forbidden arguments,” Judge Pierre Leval said.

The Clinton administration and Legal Services, both trying to ensure the legal group’s survival, separately appealed to the Supreme Court. They cited rulings involving doctors and artists that upheld similar restrictions. In 1991, the court on a 5-4 vote agreed that the government can restrict doctors in federally subsidized clinics from advising women about abortion.

Two years ago, the court also ruled that Congress can tell the National Endowment for the Arts to consider “standards of decency” before awarding grants to artists.

On Monday, the justices agreed to hear the appeal in the Legal Services Corp. case (LSC vs. Velasquez, 99-603, and United States vs. Velasquez, 99-960). A final ruling will not come until early next year.

Meanwhile, the administration has sided with abortion-rights advocates in the pending case over “partial-birth” abortions. Its lawyers filed a brief last week that urged the court to strike down a Nebraska law. They said that this midterm abortion method is safer for some women.

On Monday, however, the justices said that they did not want to hear from the administration’s lawyers during the oral argument on April 25. The one-line order denying the request for argument time was somewhat unusual. Typically, the court sets aside some time to hear from the U.S. solicitor general, the government’s top lawyer, whenever he asks to appear.

However, the Nebraska case tests a state law only. President Clinton has twice vetoed federal legislation on partial-birth abortions.