And Now, Judicare

"Laws grind the poor," observed Oliver Goldsmith in the 18th century, and little has happened since then to alter that unhappy condition. To most impoverished Americans, the law's personification is a landlord brandishing an eviction notice, a creditor repossessing furniture, a social worker cutting off welfare payments. Nonetheless, argues Anti-Poverty Czar Sargent Shriver, the law can and should be made to protect the poor. To this end, Shriver, a Yale-educated lawyer, has been zealously promoting a pioneering program to expand legal aid to the needy.

Last week Shriver announced that the program was being more than doubled in size with $6,361,000 in new grants, bringing its budget to $10.7 million for 76 projects in 26 states.

Credit-Card Service. The sinews of the campaign are a network of neighborhood offices, staffed by federally paid lawyers, in 30 cities. With the new funds, offices will be set up in more than two dozen other communities from Connecticut to Hawaii, and a drive will be launched in 132 U.S. law schools to recruit top students as pleaders for the poor. The biggest single grant ($872,851) will go for 18 additional lawyers and five new offices on the Window Rock Navajo reservation, which spreads over parts of three Southwestern states--and now has only two lawyers for its 96,000 Indians.

Most intriguing of all the new programs is a $240,181 grant to the Wisconsin State Bar Association to set up a kind of "judicare" system, under which the poor will use credit cards for legal services. Cardholders will be allowed to use the lawyer of their choice, and their fees, at least 25% less than the regular minimum scale, will be paid out of a central fund. "In effect,'7 says Shriver, "the entire bar is taking a salary cut on behalf of the poor."

Secure Beachhead. No anti-poverty undertaking has been adopted without a skirmish, but the legal-services program seems to have established a secure beachhead. Some lawyers warn that it is the beginning of "socialized law" in the U.S., that it will take business away from private attorneys in poor neighborhoods, and that it violates the bar's Code of Ethics by actively soliciting clients' business. Nonetheless, the American Bar Association, mindful that the medical profession won little esteem by its high-powered resistance to medicare, has endorsed the project and pledged full cooperation. "In helping to carry out a program dedicated to the principle of equal justice for all," says A.B.A. President-elect Orison S. Marden, "we have nothing to lose and much to gain."

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