NOTE: the PSLawNet Blog will skip next week’s Bulletin so that we can finish our Christmas shopping and have a little sip of the egg nog.  The Bulletin will return on Friday, December 30th.  Happy holidays, cats and kittens!

This week: a Tarheel State law school launches a new clinic; New York’s chief judge takes a pragmatic approach in appealing for increased legal services funding; a shady former legal services employee gets time in the clink for skimming funds; Yale Law School’s veterans clinic goes to (legal) war with the Department of Defense – twice!; mandatory pro bono in Mississippi(?); promoting diversity in the federal workforce; a public defense shakeup in San Bernardino, CA; geeks raise money for legal services; some appreciation for the retiring ED of Rappahannock Legal Services; the continuing importance of the DOJ’s access to justice program; a pro bono up-tick in Las Vegas; and, Ropes & Gray’s deferred associates return to the firm following one-year public service placements.

• 12.16.10 – the Greensboro News & Record reports that the Elon University School of Law is stepping in to provide legal services to immigrants and refugees in the wake of a long-time provider’s discontinuance of services.  Students  and law professors involved with Elon’s Humanitarian Immigration Law Clinic “will assist clients in applying for political asylum, permanent residency, citizenship and employment authorization, as well as reunifying families separated by war and conflict.”  The clinic is launching as Lutheran Family Services, on account of poor economic conditions, is discontinuing legal services to the immigrant/refugee community.  Here’s our blog coverage of these developments from yesterday.

• 12.15.10 – the Rochester City Newspaper reports on New York Chief Judge Jonathan Lippman’s efforts to better fund legal services providers in the Empire State.  “Last month, New York Chief Judge Jonathan Lippman released a report that recommends doubling the funding for New York’s low-income legal-service providers over a period of four years. He’s including a $25-million increase in his proposed 2011-12 budget, which state legislators will have to approve. New York’s legal service providers receive $200 million a year, some from the state, some from the federal government, and from other sources … What makes the judge’s report compelling…is that it focuses on the benefit to institutions and taxpayers. It doesn’t just reiterate the many important benefits to clients.  The report says that New York loses an estimated $400 million annually because state residents have difficulty collecting federal funds for which they are eligible, including disability payments and veterans’ benefits. State and local governments, and ultimately taxpayers, end up paying for that, the report says.”

• 12.15.10 – We’re not sure whether to feel satisfied or nauseated at this news.  The Washington Examiner reports that the “former chief of finance for the Maryland Legal Aid Bureau will serve two-and-a-half years in prison for stealing more than $1 million from the nonprofit.” Benjamin King served as MLAB’s chief financial officer for 20 years.  A little more than 10 years ago, he and an accomplice (who was not with MLAB) started skimming funds from MLAB’s coffers through inflated office supply invoices.  Yuck.  (Here, also, is more detailed coverage of the scheme and King’s sentencing from the Loansafe.org website.)

• 12.15.10 – according to the Yale Daily News, the law school’s Veterans Legal Services Clinic has been very busy this week, taking part on two lawsuits against the Department of Defense.  In the first, plaintiffs, which include the ACLU and the Service Women’s Action Network in addition to the clinic, are suing DoD to secure Freedom of Information Act disclosures documenting sexual assaults and harassment in the military.  (“According to the lawsuit, sexual violence and harassment occurs almost twice as frequently in the military as in civil society.”)  In the second case, the clinic filed a lawsuit…on behalf of Vietnam Veterans of America against the Department of Defense seeking the release of records relating to the wrongful discharge of 26,000 veterans on the basis of personality disorder….“

• 12.15.10 – Will Mississippi become the first state to mandate pro bono from its attorneys?  Stateline.org reports on the Mississippi Supreme Court’s proposal to require most lawyers to “provide 20 hours of pro bono work per year or pay a $500 fee.”  The move comes as more and more low-income clients seek help from the state’s strained legal services providers.  We covered the mandatory pro bono proposal in a blog post last week.

• 12.14.10 – from the Washington Post we learn that President Obama “is preparing a presidential directive, in the form of an executive order or presidential memorandum, on increasing federal workplace diversity.”  Diversity stats are bad with respect to senior positions in federal government.  The Post notes that “[w]hite men held more than 61 percent of senior pay level positions in fiscal 2009, far more than their representation in the total workforce, according to the latest Annual Report on the Federal Work Force by the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission.  Women hold just 29 percent of senior positions. African Americans are a paltry 7 percent, and Latinos are almost invisible at 3.6 percent.”

• 12.14.10 – It hasn’t been all rainbows and lollipops for San Bernardino County public defenders.  The Redlands Daily Facts (great name!) reports that  the “two top administrators at the San Bernardino County Public Defender’s Office – Public Defender Doreen Boxer and Assistant Public Defender Lauri Ferguson – resigned Tuesday amid allegations of mismanagement and plummeting morale in the office.”

• 12.12.10 – a couple weeks ago we reported (Item 14) on a legal services fundraiser that allowed dorky attorneys and other professionals to support the cause by, well, behaving like dorks.  As reported by IPwatchdog.com, the Patently Impossible Project, through which attorneys were given a kit of raw materials and competed to put together a catapult-type device that could launch a penny, raised about $8000 for the Legal Aid Society in Miami-Dade County.

• 12.11.10 – the Free Lance-Star of Fredericksburg, Virginia tugs at our heartstrings with a piece profiling Bill Botts, the retiring executive director of Rappahannock Legal Services.  Botts’s career in public service began when he served as a VISTA volunteer in Louisiana.  (He and his VISTA counterparts successfully stirred up trouble to the point that the Louisiana governor kicked them out of the parish.  Good stuff!)  Botts went on to law school and a distinguished legal services career during which he’s stood up for those at the extremes of society’s margins from Florida sugar-cane fields to low-income communities throughout the Fredericksburg area.

• 12.10.10 – a Washington Post editorial, acknowledging the departure of Harvard professor Laurence Tribe as head of the DOJ’s access-to-justice program, urges that the important work of the program continue in Tribe’s absence, and that the Obama Administration appoint another legal titan to pursue the AtJ agenda. The PSLawNet Blog was pleased to read this editorial.  While the DOJ’s access-to-justice program isn’t particularly well funded, by virtue of its name it carries a lot of weight.  Its talented-but-small staff can do much to generate dialogue among stakeholders in the public interest and pro bono communities, and to produce innovative solutions to deliver legal services to low-income clients in the criminal and civil arenas.

• 12.9.10 – Pro bono’s blowing up in Sin City!  From the Las Vegas Review-Journal: “An economy in wholesale crisis and lawyers stepping up in response to it has resulted in a record-breaking year for pro bono services in Clark County, where more than 16,000 hours of free legal services were provided to the county’s lowest-income residents.”  The Legal Aid Center of Southern Nevada acknowledged its many pro bono all stars at a luncheon last week.

• 12.7.10 – the Chicago Daily Law Bulletin reports on two Ropes & Gray associates who participated in the firm’s New Alternatives Program, which offered incoming associates the chance to work for a year in public interest with a $60,000 stipend.  The piece notes that about 70 Ropes & Gray associates participated in the program in 2009, taking public interest placements throughout the country.  Unfortunately the article’s password protected, to so we can’t link to it.