PSJD Public Interest News Digest – March 1, 2019
Sam Halpert, NALP Director of Public Service Initiatives
Hello there, interested public! It’s March now, but the last week of February certainly packed a punch. There are two items I want to highlight for you:
First, Brooklyn Defender Services’ Director of Policy took to Twitter yesterday to highlight a two-justice dissenting opinion questioning Gideon v. Wainright. (Link to the opinion available below.) Second, any of you heading to the ABA’s Equal Justice Conference in May may want to check out the Law School Pro Bono Advisor’s Pre-Conference event.
If that isn’t enough, there’s also a legal aid strike brewing in British Columbia, a new FTC task force to police the technology sector, a report from the U.N. Special Rapporteur on Adequate Housing tying housing to the access-to-justice gap, and allegations of infants under one-year-old detained by ICE. As always, details are in the links below.
See you around,
Sam
Student Debt
- In Washington DC, “a federal court found [that when] the U.S. Department of Education changed its interpretation of the Public Service Loan Forgiveness regulation, it did not adhere to notice standards mandated under the Administrative Procedure Act, and those changes were arbitrary and capricious.“
- According to the New York Federal Reserve Bank, “[o]utstanding student loan debt stood at 1.46 trillion in the fourth quarter [of 2018], up $15 billion[, with] 11.4% of aggregate student debt [] 90+ days delinquent or in default.“
- Meanwhile, Philly.com reported that “[FedLoan’s] profits have plummed by 90 percent over the last four years [and] the agency could soon start to lose money[.]“
- In Washington DC, Senators Warren and Rubio “introduced a bill that would prevent states from suspending, revoking or denying professional licenses as punishment for falling behind on student loan payments.“
- In Oregon, the Bellingham Herald surveyed the efforts across multiple states–including Oregon–to pass protections for student borrowers similar to “Connecticut’s so-called Student Loan Bill of Rights.” (See this article for developments in New York State on this issue.)
- Guardian Life Insurance released “College Debt in America: The Case for Tuition & Loan Repayment Benefits,” a report which includes this chart comparing the rise in costs for health care and tuition, relative to the consumer price index (see page 3 of the report).
- Governing.com reviewed the history-to-date of “income share agreements” as an alternative to student loans, a strategy for which “[f]ederal legislation…enjoyed bipartisan support last Congress and is set for reintroduction this year as well.“
- The New York Times published a story about a teacher who, after having finished with his loans under the Public Service Loan Forgiveness Program, nevertheless received “a deliquincey report [from FedLoan] to the scorekeepers at Equifax, Experian and TransUnion that effectively wrecked his credit.”
- The Washington Post reported that “[a] contractor for the Education Department is suing the federal agency, alleging that billions of dollars in defaulted student loans go uncollected because the government is not lining up new private debt collectors.”
Nonprofit Management
- According to Fox News Oklahoma City, “[a] study from the Fundraising Effectiveness Project shows about a four percent decrease in donations under $1,000 to nonprofits in 2018, and a slight increase in donations over $1,000.” The Hill has more on the subject.
Immigration, Refugee, and Citizenship Issues
- In a letter to Homeland Security’s Office for Civil Rights and Civil Liberties and its Inspector General, the American Immigration Council, American Immigration Lawyers Council, and the Catholic Legal Immigration Network alleged that “there are at least nine infants under one year of age detained in the South Texas Family Residential Center (STFRC) in Dilley, Texas, at least one of whom has been detained for more than 20 days.” The letter calls for the release of the infants and their mothers, as well as a “review [of] any written decisions by the Department of Homeland Security to detain the infants,” along with other demands related to their medical care while in custody.
- In Texas, “[s]aying there is no evidence of widespread election fraud in Texas, a federal judge…blocked the removal of any registered voter after state Republican leaders loudly but wrongly questioned the U.S. citizenship of tens of thousands of people.“
- In Illinois, the state’s attorney general “joined an amicus brief supporting a lawsuit challenging the U.S. Customs and Border Protection’s practice of denying people access to the asylum process at ports of entry on the southern border.“
- In Washington DC, UDC Law announced that “more than 40 clinical and experiemental programs across the country have requested the teacher’s guide to [the Legal Interviewing and Language Access Film Project], which coaches law students on client interviewing techniques in the immigration law context.” (UDC Law developed the project in collaboration with Tulane University Law School.)
- In New Haven CT, Yale’s “Rule of Law Clinic…in conjunction with over 60 former U.S. government officials, issued a joint statement challenging the validity of President Donald Trump’s Feb. 15 declaration of a national emergency at the southern border.”
Legal Technology
- In New York NY, Hotspot Law launched “a new legal technology platform that allows for real-time free phone consultation booking between consumers and attorneys….designed to provide free and simple access to justice for everyone.”
- In San Francisco CA, the city’s district attorney announced that his office used algorithms developed by Code for America “to erase 8,000 marijuana convictions and reduce felony convictions to misdemeanours.”
- In Palo Alto CA, Stanford News profiled the work of the law school’s “Administering by Algorithm” policy lab, which explores the question of what happens when government agencies can’t explain how the algorithms that they use to make decisions work.
- In Washington DC, “[t]he Federal Trade Commission’s Bureau of Competition announced the creation of a task force dedicated to monitoring competition in U.S. technology markets, investigating any potential anticompetitive conduct in those markets, and taking enforcement actions when warranted.”
Access to Justice – Civil
- At the 40th session of the U.N. Human Rights Council, the Special Rapporteur on Adequate Housing issued a report on Access to justice for the right to housing suggesting that “the global housing crisis is rooted in a crisis in access to justice because without access to justice, housing is not properly recognized, understood or addressed as a human right.”
- In Toronto ON, at the Federation of Asian Canadian Lawyers conference, the chief justice of the Supreme Court of Canada re-iterated his position that “lawyers [] have a responsibility to help solve the access-to-justice problem” by taking on pro bono work.
- In Oregon, The Register Guard ran an opinion column calling attention to the law pay of civil legal aid attorneys in the state, as the newspaper and state legislators discuss the underpaid status of public defenders–who the letter-writer notes are still better compensated than legal aid attorneys.
Access to Justice – Criminal
- In British Columbia, “[legal services l]awyers say they will [strike] April 1, potentially leaving clients and criminal defendants without representation and the courts in chaos, if the government doesn’t dramatically increase legal-aid funding.” Against this backdrop, the Editorial Board of the Vancouver Sun argued, in a letter written by the director of the Association of Legal Aid Lawyers, that “B.C. has an access-to-justice and legal aid crisis [that] can be traced back to years of cuts and underfunding in the legal-aid system,” and suggested that “the legal profession in B.C. generates more-than-sufficient revenue directly from the tax on legal fees to fund a[n adequate] legal-aid system.“
- In Travis County TX, local news provided another account of the ongoing dispute among members of the commission charged with improving indigent defense in the county.
- In Bayonne City NJ, the city council introduced a bill proposing to quadruple their public defender “user fee”, “add[ing] Bayonne to a long list of municipalities that hav eraised their fees since 2015, when the state started allowing municipalities to do so.“
- In Michigan, “[t]here should be a public defender’s office…by late summer [as the board of commissioners] agreed to accept $2,217,515 from the state to fund a public defender’s office [for Van Buren and Allegan Counties].” Meanwhile, “[t]he newly created public defender’s office in Shiawassee County is up and running[.]“
- In dissent from the Supreme Court’s opinion in Garza v. Idaho, Justice Thomas, joined by Justice Gorsuch, argued that:
The right to counsel is not an assurance of an error-free trial or even a reliable result. It ensures fairness in a single respect: permitting the accused to employ the services of an attorney. The structural protections provided in the Sixth Amendment certainly seek to promote reliable criminal proceedings, but there is no substantive right to a particular level of reliability. In assuming otherwise, our ever-growing right-to-counsel precedents directly conflict with the government’s legitimate interest in the finality of criminal judgments.
Garza v. Idaho, No. 17-1026, slip op. at 17 (U.S. 2019)