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(2) The NEJL Oral History Program.
Much of the history the NEJL hopes to collect, preserve, and make available
to present and future generations resides not in written documents but in the
recollections of those who lived that history. The NEJL has embarked on a
program to conduct videotaped oral history interviews with scores of
individuals who have played important roles during the past four decades in the
development of programs delivering representation to lower income people in
civil and criminal cases.
We already have conducted over fifty videotape
interviews with important figures in the legal services and public defender
communities, including Hillary Clinton who chaired the Legal Services
Corporation board a quarter century ago, the late Professor Gary Bellow
of Harvard who played an instrumental role not only in the development of
federally-funded civil legal services but of the modern approach to clinical
legal education, and Alex Forger who served as President of the Legal
Services Corporation during LSC’s most recent political turmoil in the
mid-1990’s. Conducted by volunteer lawyers, these interviews
can be viewed on the TV-VCR in the NEJL’s Media Center.
One of the Library’s most urgent tasks is to accelerate
this program. Most of those who participated in the dramatic developments of the
1960’s and 1970’s are now in their 60’s, 70’s, and 80’s. In the next
two years, we would like to complete videotape interviews with all
individuals who played important roles in the creation of the OEO Legal Services
Program in the mid-1960’s, the creation of the Legal Services Corporation in
the early 1970’s, the constitutional litigation on the right to counsel and
vast expansion of indigent criminal defense during that same era. (From 1963
to the present day the nation’s investment in indigent defense services rose
from a few million dollars a year to three billion dollars a year.)
We estimate this oral history project will involve at least a
hundred additional interviews. In order to accomplish these interviews, however,
the NEJL will need to obtain additional financial resources. Although volunteer
lawyers can conduct the interviews, it will require the services of a part-time
coordinator to plan the interview schedule, obtain background information for
the interviewers, arrange the logistics, and organize the resulting videotapes.
In addition to completing this set of critical interviews, the NEJL also has
plans to catalog and to transcribe selective portions of the videotaped
conversations. This task, too, will require additional funds.
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