Book Notes

BOOK NOTES: brief reviews of books on the NEJL shelves

Frequently, the National Equal Justice Library acquires books which we suspect may not have come to the attention of lawyers and others interested in the subject of equal access to justice, even though these books appear of considerable relevance to this field. Often they are books in the social sciences or published in other countries. This “Book Notes” column features such books and provides brief reviews summarizing the contents and what readers might gain from the publication. Incidentally, most if not all of the books discussed below, even those published many years ago, can be purchased through amazon.com or barnesandnoble.com.

Susan E. Lawrence, The Poor in Court: The Legal Services Program and Supreme Court Decision Making (Princeton University Press, 3175 Princeton Pike, Lawrenceville, NJ 08648, published 1990, 159 pages, plus notes and appendices.)

This book earned the author, now a professor of political science at Rutgers, the 1986 American Political Science Association’s award for best dissertation in Public Law. It reports and analyzes the eighty cases legal services lawyers argued in the Supreme Court from 1966-74, representing seven percent of the court’s written decision during that period. Professor Lawrence reports the legal services lawyers won almost two-thirds of their cases in the high court, many of which had far-rangin impact on the lives of the poor, and concludes those cases also “were influential inshaping the course of judicial policy development,” particularly the high court’s evolving theories on equal protection and due process.

After an extensive review of the OEO Legal Services Program and the other efforts of the lawyers it funded, as well as the cases brought to the Supreme Court, Lawrence also makes another finding. “Contrary to the views of some critics, the LSP’s appellate litigation was not a separate enterprise analogous to interest group litigation, but an extension of the Program’s client service.”

The Poor in Court is a thoroughly researched, well-written and objective empirical study of an important facet of legal services work, seeking justice in the appellate courts when it can’t be won in the trial courts. The book is filled with tables and charts and comparisons which make interesting reading in themselves, as they analyze these eighty cases from several perspectives. While published a decade ago, and covering cases decided over a quarter century ago, this book describes a history and analyzes issues which are just as relevant today as they were in the 1960’s and 1970’s.

Martha Davis, Brutal Need: Legal Services and the Welfare Rights Movement (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1993) 187 pages.

During the late 1960’s and early 1970’s Edward Sparer and a number of legal services lawyers brought law and order to an arbitrary welfare system, requiring administrators to obey the Constitution and federal law. This excellent book documents these largely successful efforts as well as Sparer’s ultimately unsuccessful attempt to go further and establish a constitutional right to welfare. Ms. Davis also describes the backdrop against which all legal representation of welfare recipients proceeded during this era – a very active network of community-based welfare rights organizations with their own ambitious agendas.

The author, a lawyer with the NAACP, researched the subject for several years with foundation funding. She candidly assesses the wins and losses, the wise decisions and the not-so-wise, by both legal services lawyers and the welfare rights organizations. This book conveys useful information and supplies important lessons for lawyers and others confronting the present, very different welfare environment.

Melissa Fay Greene, Praying for Sheetrock (Ballantine, 1991)

The first Reginald Heber Smith Book Awards were presented at the Reunion banquet for the Reginald Heber Smith Fellows by Jay Urwitz, a partner in the prominent Boston law firm, Hale and Dorr, where Mr Smith worked for over 40 years after leaving the Boston Legal Aid Society. In giving Melissa Fay Greene the award for her book, Urwitz read the explanation the independent Smith-Cahn Award Committee had given for choosing this book for one of the two Smith Book Awards.

“Praying for Sheetrock is an unusual book. Although Melissa Greene deals with a familiar theme -- the challenge of using the law to secure rights for poor people in an unreceptive environment -- the story is fresh, powerful, uplifting and tragic, and is extraordinarily well told. The author carefully intermeshes the flow of events with character development. The result is engaging and suspenseful. Presented throughout is the spirit, tenacity and vitality of poverty law lawyers. Perhaps uniquely so, Praying for Sheetrock reveals both the importance of law to the poor and the complexity and unpredictability of achieving social change through legal action.”

For the reasons highlighted by the awards committee this book provides a marvelous introduction to the legal services field for those who know nothing about the subject. At the same time, it offers valuable insights for even the most experienced poverty lawyer.

Most “Book Notes” feature books about legal services and indigent defense in the United States. But as demonstrated by its International Legal Aid Collection the National Equal Justice Library recognizes the United States has much to learn from the rest of the world. In fact, at present there is a far larger scholarly community outside the U.S. focused primarily on issues involving the organization, financing, and delivery of legal services than is found in this country. Below we briefly discuss the most recent in a series produced by members of the Legal Aid and Legal Services Group of the International Sociological Association. This group includes over twenty-five legal aid scholars from more than a dozen countries on four continents. It holds an international conference once a year, the most recent this past June in Vancouver, British Columbia, and frequently includes administrators of legal aid programs in those meetings.

Francis Regan, Alan Paterson, Tamara Goriely & Don Fleming, The Transformation of Legal Aid: Comparative and Historical Studies (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999) 305 pgs.

The four named editors who also wrote chapters for the book were joined by another nine scholars to produce a thought-provoking series of studies examining how legal aid is faring among the industrial democracies as we enter a new century. The authors come from Australia, Canada, Ireland, the Netherlands, Norway, Scotland, and the United States. But they write about and compare legal aid systems in another dozen countries as well.

Different chapters address such provocative topics as why legal aid services vary between societies; why legal services spending in the U.S. has lagged so far behind the explosive expansion experienced in so many other countries; how the composition of the legal aid caseload is affected by the structure of welfare and government institutions in a given country; why European countries, all subject to a right to counsel in criminal cases, demonstrate such wide variations in their expenditure levels on indigent criminal defense; the political conflict that arises under “judicare” systems between the private bar and government budget managers over the size of the legal aid appropriation; conceptual issues and practical problems in measuring the need for legal services and gauging the quality of the services rendered; and, what is the proper role of government-funded legal aid in providing representation for poor people in “multi-party” cases.

This book is filled with information and insights of great value not only to U.S. scholars but to legal aid policymakers and administrators, in the U.S. or any country. Fortunately, it is written in a readable style that is easily accessible to this broader audience.