The Missionaries

Many of the Supreme Court's recent criminal-law decisions have a common element: in one way or another, they reflect the law's discrimination against the poor. They have challenged the adequacy of the bar's long tradition of giving free help through legal-aid societies. Case after case has been a reminder that by waiting for clients to come to them--often in offices far from the slums--legal-aid services have apparently failed to reach vast numbers of people who need them, in civil as well as criminal matters.

In 1964 legal-aid societies as well as public defenders tackled 620,000 cases. Yet the American Bar Foundation estimates that 1,400,000 indigents a year are tried without lawyers in U.S. courts --to say nothing of the problems that afflict millions of other poor Americans whose rights are often routinely ignored by landlords, merchants and faceless welfare agencies. The result, say experts, is the breeding of a dangerous disbelief in equal justice.

Muscle for the Poor. One promising new remedy is to supplement legal-aid societies by setting up storefront "neighborhood law offices"--in effect, to send legal missionaries into low-income areas to educate the poor in how to assert their rights. In New Haven last year, for example, the Ford Foundation financed the prototype New Haven Legal Assistance Association Inc. Traditionalists raised a cry of "socialized law," warning, in the words of one lawyer, that "you cheapen the legal profession by putting it in a storefront and soliciting business." The county bar association voted its disapproval. But the state bar approved, and last May 1 (Law Day), the association opened the first of two neighborhood offices, with then Supreme Court Justice Arthur Goldberg on hand to hail "the start of a new process--a process which will expand the rule of law to all segments of the population."

The New Haven association pays Lawyer Charles D. Gill, 27, a salary of $8,000 a year to run his office in a onetime bookie joint next to a pool hall. His clients, mostly Negroes and Puerto Ricans, are carefully screened by 20 Yale law students to determine financial eligibility. The cutoff point: $50 net weekly income per couple, plus $10 per dependent.

For people with incomes below this level, Gill has already handled 396 cases, now averages 80 a week. He has his share of criminal cases, including one now before the U.S. Supreme Court, but his big job is giving the poor new muscle in civil matters. For ex ample, one family of five, in a public-housing project, returned from a weekend trip to find their front door smashed. Officials charged $96 to fix the door, then threatened eviction when the family understandably refused to pay. Gill simply threatened to go to court, and the matter was dropped.

With a few such private projects leading the way, the Federal Government is also getting into the act by financing free legal services in 19 cities. The need is obvious. In Chicago, where the Government's effort is still mired in a bureaucratic swamp, the bar-run Legal Aid Bureau readily admits: "We only serve half the people who need our services." In Washington, however, the mainly Government-financed Neighborhood Legal Service Project has six thriving neighborhood centers serving 180,000 people. Of all its cases so far, 30.7% involve housing, 10.6% consumer rights, 8% welfare, 7.3% adult criminal matters and 5.7% juvenile problems.

New Experience. In Oakland, Calif., four Government-financed neighborhood centers run by the county legal-aid society have done as much business in three months as they expected in a year. Oakland now hopes to double its $60,483 federal grant. In case after case, Oakland's centers have stopped collection agencies from attaching slum dwellers' salaries--thus halting job loss, family breakups and welfare problems that wind up costing taxpayers twice as much as a little preventive law.

Though some members of the American Bar Association fret about "solicit- ing," which A.B.A. canons of ethics sternly forbid, the association has voted to aid such efforts (TIME, Aug. 20). The trend may particularly benefit law schools. The University of Detroit Law School, for example, recently promoted a new state ruling permitting law students to try cases in court--a boon to the legal-aid clinic that the university is setting up with a $242,000 Government grant. The University of Michigan Law School is following suit. As one student puts it: "We're hungry for bread-and-butter experience."

Business for All. Oddly enough, one of the strongest protests so far has come not from prosperous purists but from three struggling Negro lawyers in Washington who charge that neighborhood law offices are "siphoning off legal business" and leaving some lawyers in a state of "penury." What hurts them is the Washington indigency standard: $65 a week or less per couple. That, says one of the Negro lawyers, "would damn near qualify a lot of lawyers for help."

To halt such "conspiratorial" competition, the slum lawyers have filed a federal antitrust suit seeking injunctions and $450,000 in treble damages. The first suit of its kind demands a hard look at possible inequities. But in the long run, a decision that supports the. neighborhood service is likely to help the poor become more prosperous--and boost business for all U.S. lawyers.

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