Telephone = (202) 274-4320

FAX = (202) 274-4365 

 e-mail = nejl@wcl.american.edu 

Main NEJL website=              http:// nejl.wcl.american.edu

Page 15

National Equal Justice Library

(10) Conferences and   Educational programs.

There is an abysmal ignorance about the status of equal justice in the United States -- how far we have come and how far we have yet to go. A good indication of the level of that ignorance was reflected in a pair of public opinion polls conducted in 1991, one in California and the other surveying a national sample. These polls revealed three-quarters of Americans think poor people already have a guaranteed right to counsel in civil cases just as they do in criminal cases. College and high school students, and even law students and lawyers, also lack essential knowledge about the subject of equal access to justice. One of NEJL’s missions is to remedy this woeful lack of information about this vital element of our democratic system. To this end, we plan to develop and implement educational programs directed at students (secondary, college, and law school), the legal profession, and the general public.

To illustrate what can be done, even before the NEJL opened, those involved in its development managed to produce a 64-page teaching guide for middle and high schools covering the history of civil and criminal legal assistance in the U.S. and abroad. We produced this guide in collaboration with the ABA and that organization distributed it to schools throughout the country. The curriculum also exposed students to some of the policy issues raised by our attempts to bring equal justice to poor people. Once its collection efforts and other programs are further along, the NEJL is planning to produce a series of booklets and brief videos aimed at students and the general public. These will dramatize historic incidents, intriguing personalities, and interesting information that illustrate important lessons about the significance of equal justice to the proper functioning of democracy.

The NEJL also considers it important to educate judges and lawyers about these subjects and to raise the priority of equal justice concerns among these audiences. Unfortunately, many judges and lawyers know far too little about the current status of equal justice in the United States and the plight of lower income citizens trying to access the legal system.

Also before the Library opened, the NEJL held a conference commemorating the 30th anniversary of the Gideon v Wainwright opinion declaring a right to counsel in civil cases. This conference brought together attorneys who briefed and argued this appeal in the Supreme Court with current public defenders seeking to implement that right in the present day. The American University Law Review published the proceedings of this conference. 

The NEJL also co-sponsored an international conference on legal aid in the industrial democracies, which was held at the University of Maryland. 

The NEJL Dedication event in September, 1997 included a panel on legal aid in Europe and Canada and a “Town Hall” discussion featuring more than a dozen of the nation’s leading experts on legal services and defender issues addressing the long-term future of equal justice in this country. And in April, 2000, an NEJL board member gave a speech at a conference sponsored by the Association of the Bar of the City of New York presenting some of the information on legal aid in other countries the Library has accumulated during the past few years.

In the same vein, on November 13-14, 1998 the National Equal Justice Library sponsored a reunion of Reginald Heber Smith Fellows (usually called “Reggies.”) For fifteen years starting in 1967, this program recruited over two thousand outstanding young lawyers into the legal services field. Some remain in that field today, but many others have gone on to positions in the judiciary, academia, government and the private bar. (Some became governors, cabinet members, big city mayors, appellate judges, legislators, law school deans, managing partners of law firms, or achieved other leadership positions in society.) This reunion reattached this group to the ideals that brought them to the legal services field initially. The NEJL also used the opportunity to gather written materials and conduct oral history interviews with the Reggies. As a result of the reunion and related activities we learned a great deal about how their Reggie experiences influenced the later careers of these lawyers and gained a perspective on the long-term effects of such fellowship programs.

Through these and similar programs the National Equal Justice Library hopes to enlist sympathetic judges and lawyers and equip them with the knowledge to educate their colleagues about where this nation currently stands on its long and tortuous path toward the ultimate goal of equal justice for all.