The National Equal Justice Library

The National Equal Justice Library’s Award Program for

Distinguished Publications on Equal Access to Justice

In order to honor past scholarship on the subject of equal access to justice and to encourage greater interest among scholars in future research and writing in this field, the National Equal Justice Library has instituted two awards - one to honor outstanding books and the other outstanding articles. The book award is named for Reginald Heber Smith in recognition of his influential 1919 book, Justice and the Poor, which is often credited with starting the national legal aid movement in the United States. The article award is named for Edgar and Jean Cahn, in recognition of their seminal 1964 Yale Law Journal article, The War on Poverty: A Civilian Perspective which supplied the intellectual basis for the OEO Legal Services Program and its successor, the Legal Services Corporation. Each of these awards is to be presented every other year, generally in alternate years.

In addition to these regular awards, the Library occasionally will confer a special award on publications which although not on the topic of equal access to justice nevertheless in some manner contributed to the furtherance of that goal. This award is named for John Bradway, a pioneer in both legal aid and clinical legal education, and an author of several books and articles in both those fields.

The recipients of the first awards are listed below, and further information about the awards, the selection process, the nominated publications, and the presentation ceremonies follows. (It should be noted nominations for this first round of awards were open to any book or article published in the 20th Century. The same will be true for the second round of awards for which the Library is accepting nominations now.)

REGINALD HEBER SMITH

BOOK AWARD

for distinguished scholarship on the subject

of equal access to justice

Reginald Heber Smith

JUSTICE AND THE POOR (New York: Carnegie, 1919)

Melissa Fay Greene

Praying for Sheetrock (New York: Ballantine Books, 1991)

Edgar and Jean Cahn

Article Award

for distinguished scholarship on the subject

of equal access to justice

Edgar and Jean Cahn

The War on Poverty: A Civilian Perspective, Yale Law Journal (1964)

Marc Feldman

Political Lessons: Legal Services for the Poor, Georgetown Law Review (1995)

JOHN BRADWAY AWARD

for publications that contribute

to the goal of equal access to justice

Gary Bellow and Beatrice Moulton

LAWYERING PROCESS: ETHICS AND PROFESSIONALISM (St. Paul: Foundation Press, 1981)

Smith-Cahn Awards Selection Committee

Inaugural Reginald Heber Smith Book Award Nominees and Award Recipients

Inaugural Edgar and Jean Cahn Award Recipients Selected

Nominations Open for Second Round of Smith and Cahn Awards

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Smith Book Award and Cahn Article Award winners

chosen by distinguished independent committee of scholars

The National Equal Justice Library assembled an independent panel of distinguished scholars to choose the books to receive the first pair of Reginald Heber Smith Book Awards. The same selection committee also chose the first round of three Cahn Article awardees, discussed below. This Smith-Cahn Awards Selection Committee was chaired by Gerald Caplan, Dean of McGeorge School of Law and a former Acting President of the Legal Services Corporation. The other members included: Professor Lucie White of Harvard Law School, a leading scholar in the field of poverty law; Gerry Singsen, a former Vice President of the Legal Services Corporation and Director of Harvard Law School’s Program on the Legal Profession; Victor Rosenblum of Northwestern University School of Law who is a Professor of Law and of Political Science, a former President of Reed College and of the Association of American Law Schools; Stewart Macaulay of the University of Wisconsin who is a noted scholar of sociology in law and one of the early Presidents of the Law And Society Association; and, Professor Susan Bennett of Washington College of Law who heads the law school’s Public Interest Law Clinic and is a leading scholar in the field of clinical legal education and related issues.

The inaugural Reginald Heber Smith Book Awards were presented at the November 1998 reunion of Reginald Heber Smith Fellows, the alumni of a prestigious fellowship program established in 1967 also named for Smith and designed to recruit outstanding young lawyers to serve the nation’s poor people. The National Equal Justice Library and its host institution, Washington College of Law, co-sponsored this reunion which brought over 150 former “Reggies” to the law school. Jay Hurwitz, a partner in Hale and Dorr, the Boston law firm at which Reginald Heber Smith spent nearly 40 years of his career, presented the two Smith Book Awards at the reunion’s closing banquet.

Since this is the first time anyone has conferred awards in this subject area, the Library opened nominations to books published anytime in the 20th Century. For the same reason, in this first year the Library presented two awards of equal stature to the two most deserving of the nominated publications. The Library welcomed nominations for books from any discipline including history, political science, legal doctrine, economics, sociology, public policy analysis, comparative legal institutions, and biography. But no publication authored by a member of the Library’s Board of Directors was eligible to be considered for the award.

The nominees for the 1998 Reginald Heber Smith Book Award included the following important books published during the last three decades:

· Mauro Cappelletti and Bryant Garth, Access to Justice: A World Survey (Alphen aan den Rijn/Milan: Sijthof/Guiffre, 1978).

· Jeremy Cooper, Public Legal Services: A Comparative Study of Policy, Politics, and Practice (London: Sweet & Maxwell, 1983).

· Martha F. Davis, Brutal Need: Lawyers and the Welfare Rights Movement (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1993).

· Bryant Garth, Neighborhood Law Firms for the Poor: A Comparative Study of Recent Developments in Legal Aid and the Legal Profession (Alphen aan den Rijn: Sijthof & Noordhoff, 1980).

· Melissa Fay Greene, Praying for Sheetrock (New York: Ballantine Books, 1991).

· Joel Handler, Ellen Jane Hollingsworth & Howard S. Erlanger, Lawyers and the Pursuit of Legal Rights (New York: Academic Press, 1978).

· Jack Katz, Poor People Lawyers in Transition (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1982).

· Susan E. Lawrence, The Poor In Court: The Legal Services Program and Supreme Court Decision Making (Lawrenceville: Princeton University Press, 1990).

The two books chosen as the first winners of the Reginald Heber Smith Book Awards illustrate the wide diversity of disciplines eligible for this award. The only requirement is that books relate to the subject of equal access to justice.

One of the awards went to a classic social science study, Lawyers and the Pursuit of Legal Rights by Professors Joel Handler of UCLA and Elizabeth Jane Hollander and Howard Erlanger of the University of Wisconsin. It is based on interviews with over a thousand lawyers who had worked in legal services in 1967 and a control group of lawyers who had entered private practice at the same time. Using sophisticated social science techniques, the authors compared the two groups six years later and essentially found once a legal services lawyer, always a legal services lawyer. Even though over half the legal services lawyers no longer were working in that field, the vast majority were involved in closely related activities — public interest law, clinical legal education, and the like.

The other Smith Awardee was Praying for Sheetrock by Melissa Fay Greene, a case study that reads like a novel and tells a wonderful but complex story about clients and poverty lawyers successfully challenging corruption in a rural Georgia county, and the not always happy aftermath of that event. Ms. Greene was a VISTA paralegal in the office she wrote about and after the success of Praying for Sheetrock has gone on to become a noted author with three other books to her credit, all well-received.

The independent Smith-Cahn Awards Selection Committee also voted to confer a special award, on Lawyering Process: Ethics and Professionalism by Professors Gary Bellow of Harvard Law School and Bea Moulton of Hastings Law School. Although this book is not on the subject of equal access to justice, the Committee found Lawyering Process had made a unique and outstanding contribution to clinical legal education and through that had significantly increased the quantity and quality of legal representation for those unable to afford their own counsel. This special award named for legal aid and clinical education pioneer John Bradway will be conferred at separate ceremonies. Professor Moulton will receive her award at the annual Clinical Law conference in May, 2000 while Professor Bellow will be presented his award at a ceremony in Boston later this year.

First three Cahn Article Award winners selected--

one award presented and two to be presented later in 2000

The independent Smith-Cahn Awards Selection Committee completed its deliberations on the first round of Edgar and Jean Cahn Article Awards late in 1999. The Committee chose three honorees -- one for the outstanding article published before 1980, another for the outstanding article of the 1980s, and a third for the outstanding article of the 1990s.

The award for the outstanding article published in the 1990s was presented at the annual conference of the Association of American Law Schools which brings together law professors and deans from all the nation's law school. This year's conference took place in Washington, D.C. in early January, 2000. Professor Elliot Milstein, the President-Elect of the Association presented the Cahn Award. Appropriately, Professor Milstein was the Dean of Washington College of Law at the time it was chosen as the host institution for the National Equal Justice Library.

Milstein presented this initial Cahn Award to the late Marc Feldman, who was a Professor of Law at the University of Maryland until his untimely death in 1999. Although the award was for Professor Feldman's entire career of scholarship in this field, the nominated article which won him the Cahn Award was entitled "Political Lessons: Legal Services for the Poor." Published in Volume 83 of the Georgetown Law Journal starting at page 1529, this article sets forth a detailed, somewhat controversial "revisionist history" of the development of the OEO Legal Services Program and argues those in charge of the program should have led it in a more radical direction from the outset.

It is expected the other two 1999 Cahn Awards will be presented at other events later in 2000, one in Washington, D.C. and the other in Los Angeles, California.

Nominations open for 2000-2001 Smith Book Awards

and Cahn Article Awards

Anyone who has a favorite book or article they have read related in any way to the general subject of equal justice for lower income people should submit a nomination to the National Equal Justice Library. The NEJL will be awarding its second round of Reginald Heber Smith Book Awards in the year 2000 and its second round of Edgar and Jean Cahn Article Awards in 2001. Two awards will be conferred in each category and any book or article published anytime in the 20th Century is eligible.

NOMINATIONS CLOSE ON SEPTEMBER 30, 2000 for the Reginald Heber Smith Book Awards and CLOSE ON DECEMBER 31, 2000 for the Edgar and Jean Cahn Article Awards.

To nominate a book or article, merely send a letter identifying the author, the title, the publisher of the book or the citation to the periodical in which an article appears. If you are nominating a book, please furnish a copy, if at all possible.

Full instructions and selection criteria are available at the NEJL home website:

http://nejl.wcl.american.edu.

All books and articles which were nominated for the first round of Smith and Cahn Awards are considered to be nominated for the second round as well — and thus don’t have to be re-nominated. So you may want to visit the NEJL’s home Website which lists all of the first-round nominees or simply contact the NEJL and ask if your favorite publication was nominated already.

____________________________

PLEASE ADDRESS ALL

NOMINATIONS TO:

Smith-Cahn Awards Committee

National Equal Justice Library

Washington College of Law

American University

4801 Massachusetts Ave. N.W.

Nominations open for 2000-2001 Smith Book Awards

PLEASE ADDRESS ALL

Washington D.C. 20016

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