By: Steve Grumm

Happy Friday (the 13th), dear readers.  This week I’ve been thinking about how I’m inspired – not what inspires me, but rather how inspiration strikes me.  The Atlantic is collecting readers’ thoughts on this topic.  My own conclusion is that I’m pretty boring.  Mostly, I’m a linear, process-driven thinker.  “Inspiration” comes after collecting data and viewpoints, consciously and/or subconsciously mulling them over, evaluating alternatives, and then crafting a solution.  If all of those wheels are turning subconsciously and at a quick pace, then I have what feels like an epiphanic moment.  But I still must consciously start the process if I’m to get to that endpoint.   In any case it seems to work for me.

And more importantly, the exercise of thinking about how we are inspired is in itself worthwhile.  By understanding how we work best we can bring those tools and approaches to bear on future problems.  I encourage you to think about your inspiration process (and contribute your thoughts to The Atlantic if you’re so moved).            

Okay, the latest access-to-justice, pro bono, funding, job market, and related news:

• Texas moving toward adoption of standard forms for pro-se, uncontested divorces;
• Minnesota law students are pitching in big-time to narrow the justice gap;
• a class-action lawsuit against a PA county alleges underfunding of indigent defense;
• MassMutual pledges pro bono assistance and funding in the Bay State;
• Community Legal Services of mid-Florida is one fine place to work;
• the “profound transformation” of pro bono over the past three decades;
• gun-totin’ prosecutors in Minnesota;
• pro bon-Oh, Canada;
• Texas high court honored for AtJ commitment;
• more pro bono volunteers in the Volunteer State;
• re-examining welfare reform’s “successes” in a recession’s aftermath;
• spotlight on South Texas College of Law’s Human Trafficking/Immigration Clinic;
• a Wisconsin-based legal services lawyer offers the basics on managing student debt. 

The summaries:

• 4.12.12 – from the Public News Service: “The state Supreme Court is considering whether to make it easier for low-income Texans to handle simple legal cases without hiring attorneys. An advisory committee will be hashing out recommendations Friday in Austin.  At issue is whether to require all Texas courts to accept standardized do-it-yourself legal forms in uncontested divorces.”  The San Antonio Express editorial board favors the move, writing, “Texas is only one of a few states without universal divorce forms. The majority of the 43 states that have adopted the forms also mandated their courts to accept the forms. Texas needs to follow suit.  As Public Citizen and other citizen advocates have noted, many Texans can’t afford the $203 median hourly rate Texas family law lawyers charge, but that should not keep them from having access to the justice system.”  The main argument against: standardized forms could encourage a large number of people to go pro se, and could thus clog up the court system. 

• 4.10.12 – the Minneapolis Star Tribune looks at the “…growing force of Minnesota law students who are wielding more influence in courtrooms as funding for legal aid services declines and economic forces reduce paid clerkships…. The number of law students who [completed a volunteer program via the] Minnesota Justice Foundation (MJF) has grown exponentially, from 43 in 2000 to 287 in 2010. Many…are placed with nonprofits that serve low-income clients. About 19 currently work in public defenders’ offices…”  The piece goes on to cite numbers about funding cuts and job losses in civil legal services.

• 4.10.12 –  in Pennsylvania, the “Luzerne County chief public defender…filed a lawsuit against the county…alleging that a lack of funding and staffing has led to his inability to represent indigent clients. The complaint, listed as a class action, was filed by the [Pennsylvania ACLU] and Dechert LLP in Philadelphia. The ACLU has had similar complaints about the Allegheny County public defender’s office.  Al Flora Jr,, who was named the Luzerne County chief public defender in 2010, stopped accepting new applications for representation on Dec. 19 except in [certain cases].  (Story from the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette.)
  • Update: following the class-action filing on Tuesday, “Chief Public Defender Al Flora Jr. on Thursday filed a motion seeking a court order that would permit him to immediately hire six more attorneys and direct Luzerne County to pay private attorneys to represent indigent defendants who have been denied representation by his office.”  (Story from Wilkes Barre Times-Leader.)

   

• 4.10.12 – in Massachusetts, a locally-based company pitches in to address the justice gap.  From a press release: “Massachusetts Mutual Life Insurance Company (MassMutual) and the Hampden County Bar Association announced today MassMutual’s increased support for the Hampden County Legal Clinic, including a $15,000 grant and additional volunteer support through the company’s in-house legal team.  The grant is also intended to help support the expansion of pro bono activities currently administered by the Hampden County Legal Clinic.

• 4.10.12 – big props to Community Legal Services of Mid-Florida, which is a mighty fine place to work.  “Community Legal Services of Mid-Florida has been named one of the nation’s “50 Best Nonprofits To Work For In 2012″ by The NonProfit Times.  For its third annual list…publication selected nonprofits in three categories: small, medium and large organizations.  Community Legal Services was ranked ninth among medium-sized nonprofits and 18th overall, according to a news release from the Daytona Beach-based nonprofit agency.”  (Story from the Daytona Beach News-Journal.)

• 4.9.12 – the Pro Bono Institute’s Esther Lardent has occasion to look at pro bono’s “profound transformation” in the past three decades.  Pro bono’s evolution toward a sophisticated national movement began with threats to eviscerate Legal Services Corporation funding in 1980 and continued with the institutionalization of pro bono in law-firm (and now in-house) culture.   (This National Law Journal piece is password-protected.)

• 4.9.12 – It’s cold in Minnesota, so now the state’s prosecutors can pack heat.  “Gov. Mark Dayton signed a bill into law…that will allow prosecutors to arm themselves while on duty.  The legislation was drafted after a courthouse shooting nearly killed Cook County Attorney Tim Scannell last December. Previously, a quirk in state law had prohibited prosecutors from carrying weapons while on duty even though no such restrictions were imposed on judges or public defenders.  During debate on the bill, lawmakers were assured that judges will retain the right to ban guns from courtrooms and courthouse grounds.”  (Story from the Minneapolis Star-Tribune.)

• 4.9.12 – Pro Bon-Oh, Canada.  (LOL!)  Help for pro se litigants in Ontario who wish to go to the country’s high court: “Pro Bono Law Ontario (PBLO), in partnership with the Canadian Bar Association (CBA) and the Supreme Court of Canada, launched a new pilot project today to provide free legal services to low-income self-represented Ontarians seeking leave to appeal to the Supreme Court of Canada. Initiated at the Court’s request, the project will help eligible litigants determine the merits of their leave applications and offer assistance to those found to have prospects for success. The volunteer lawyers are former law clerks at the Supreme Court.” (Here’s the full press release.)

• 4.9.12 – everything’s bigger in Texas, including the high court’s AtJ commitment.  “The Texas Supreme Court will receive a 2012 American Bar Association Grassroots Advocacy Award for leading an extraordinary effort to preserve state funding for legal aid programs and also for encouraging support for legal services in other states. The award will be presented April 18 during a reception at the United States Supreme Court.  Last year, the Texas Supreme Court played a key role in obtaining funding for Texas legal aid programs at a time when state-directed support was in serious jeopardy. The…justices lobbied extensively in support of an amendment on a general appropriations bill, which led to $17.6 million in legal services funding from the Texas state legislature.”  (Full ABA release.)

• 4.7.12 -pro bono advocates in Tennessee appear to be answering the call to help overwhelmed legal services providers.  From the Tennessean: “The state Supreme Court requires lawyers to report their pro bono service each year. In 2010, 4,400 more lawyers reported volunteering their time than the year before, a 100 percent increase, according to a commission report that is headed before the Supreme Court later this year.

• 4.7.12 – in 2003, when I was a 3L, I wrote a paper on how the mid-1990s welfare-reform policy changes were faring over time.  One of the main concerns raised by reform critics was that if the economy went south, and welfare recipients ran up against newly-imposed time limits on how long they could receive benefits, thousands of people could fall through the safety net’s holes.  Fast forward to post-recession 2012.  From the New York Times: “Perhaps no law in the past generation has drawn more praise than the drive to ‘end welfare as we know it,’ which joined the late-’90s economic boom to send caseloads plunging, employment rates rising and officials of both parties hailing the virtues of tough love.  But the distress of the last four years has added a cautionary postscript: much as overlooked critics of the restrictions once warned, a program that built its reputation when times were good offered little help when jobs disappeared. Despite the worst economy in decades, the cash welfare rolls have barely budged.”

• 4.7.12 – the Houston Chronicle highlights the work of the Human Trafficking/Immigration Clinic at the South Texas College of Law: “By 2011, the…Clinic had scored some major victories.  [Clinic director Naomi] Bang’s students had helped secure visas allowing 15 Vietnamese human trafficking victims to remain in the country. Second- and third-year law students were clamoring to get into the class, and a long waiting list developed for the 10 coveted spots.

• Writing in the April edition of the Wisconsin Lawyer, 2009 law grad and current legal services lawyer Karen Bauer reviews educational debt relief options and repayment approaches for today’s grads.

The Mid-Atlantic Innocence Project (MAIP) is a small non-profit corporation that works to prevent and correct the conviction of innocent people in the District of Columbia, Maryland, and Virginia.

MAIP has an immediate opening for a full-time Staff Attorney with a demonstrated passion for criminal justice issues and investigation and/or litigation experience. Because MAIP is such a small organization, this position will include a limited amount of non-legal work, including website maintenance and some development responsibilities (shared with others on the staff).

The Staff Attorney’s duties will include: litigating MAIP cases, usually with co-counsel; supervising MAIP’s Staff Investigator, helping him prioritize cases and determine appropriate strategy in those cases; reading case files and/or interviewing potential clients to determine whether to investigate or litigate a given case; participating in meetings with our Screening Committee and Screening Director; filing Freedom of Information Act requests with our jurisdictions and appealing decisions in those requests as necessary; when exonerations do occur, helping to coordinate post-exoneration services; updating the website and Facebook page; some development activities, which will include helping to write our annual newsletter, helping to put together our annual fundraising event, and helping to coordinate our Young Professionals Committee; other MAIP duties, as appropriate.

Learn how to apply at PSLawNet!

This is question that the California Supreme Court tackled late last year. The court’s decision will be published today. Here are the case details from the Washington Post:

In a case that could affect thousands of California employers and millions of workers, the state Supreme Court will decide whether managers must order workers to take rest and meal breaks at regular intervals throughout the workday.

The question is whether California labor law requires an employer to simply “provide” meal and rest breaks to employees, or whether it must also “ensure” those breaks are taken at certain times during shifts. The court’s decision could also greatly reduce the numerous class action lawsuits surrounding the issue, which cost companies embroiled in the cases millions of dollars in legal costs.

The closely watched case was filed in 2004 by restaurant workers employed by Brinker International, which owns Chili’s and other eateries. The company’s attorneys argue that businesses cannot control workers’ breaks, and that break timing should be left to an employee’s discretion.

The workers’ lawyers counter that by not ordering breaks at regular intervals throughout the workday, employers are taking advantage of employees who don’t want to leave colleagues during busy times.

California is one of only a few states that impose a monetary penalty for employers who violate meal and rest break laws, and there is no federal law requiring employers to provide breaks. . . .

During oral arguments in November, four of the seven justices appeared to side with Brinker’s attorneys, wondering aloud if a worker could be fired for disobeying an order to take a meal break.

Kevin Allen, a workers-side employment lawyer, said he hoped the court’s decision will require employers to ensure that their workers take regular breaks. He said the law is there to protect employees from working too many hours in a row with no rest.

You can read the rest here.

Disability Rights Texas is the federally designated legal protection and advocacy agency (P&A) for people with disabilities in Texas. Its mission is to help people with disabilities understand and exercise their rights under the law, ensuring their full and equal participation in society.

Disability Rights Texas is looking to hire an attorney in its Houston office. The new attorney will handle complex litigation involving institutional rights of persons with intellectual disabilities.

To learn how to apply, see the listing at PSLawNet!

From The Atlanta Journal-Constitution:

The National Fair Housing Alliance (NFHA) filed [an administrative] complaint Tuesday with the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development. The group said it looked at [more than 1,000] foreclosed homes in several metro areas and found that they were more likely to be rundown and poorly marketed in minority neighborhoods than in white ones.

Complaints range from failing to cut grass to allowing boarded up homes to decay and failing to put up “For Sale” signs.

NFHA said Wells Fargo is violating the federal Fair Housing Act, which requires banks and investors to maintain and market homes without regard to race or ethnicity. . . .

Wells Fargo, based in San Francisco, disputed the complaint generally and said it didn’t have enough information to respond to specific cases. . . .

Shanna Smith, president of NFHA, said she hopes HUD will “call the parties together try to work this out and begin an investigation,” Smith said. “Filing this complaint with HUD will light a fire. I am sorry that this is what we have to do to get their attention.”

Smith said her organization looked at eight lenders, adding Wells Fargo was the most egregious offender and is the only bank named in the complaint. She did not rule out complaints against others.

Wells Fargo services one out of every six home loans in the United States.

Washington-based NFHA, which describes itself as “the only national organization dedicated solely to ending discrimination in housing,” said it looked at more than 1,000 homes in Baltimore; Dallas; Dayton, Ohio; Miami and Fort Lauderdale; Oakland; Philadelphia; Washington; and Atlanta.

You can read more here or here.

Thoughts?

Advancement Project is looking for a creative problem solver, strong advocate, and skilled attorney in its Washington D.C. office to serve as a Staff Attorney in its Immigrant Justice Project.

Advancement Project is a next-generation, multi-racial civil rights organization. Advancement Project tackles inequity with innovative strategies and strong community alliances. With a national office in Washington, DC and two offices in California, Advancement Project combines law, communications, policy and technology to create workable solutions and achieve systemic change.

The Staff Attorney will work in Advancement Project’s Immigrant Justice Project, which partners with grassroots organizations across the country to defend against the heightened criminalization of immigrants, those perceived to be immigrants, and communities of color. The strategies and tactics of the Immigrant Justice Project are carried out within the broader goal of racial justice. The Staff Attorney will be expected to work closely with our partner grassroots organizations, and to use a variety of legal, policy, communications, and coalition-building strategies to assist our community partners in advancing and defending immigrant rights.

To learn more, check out the listing at PSLawNet!

From the Salt Lake Tribune:

. . .[Daniel S.] Medwed has blazed a unique trail in the field of criminal defense law. He’s a board member of directors for the Innocence Network and the Rocky Mountain Innocence Center. In 2008, the 43-year-old native of Cambridge, Mass., helped draft and pass a factual innocence bill for the state of Utah, which created a procedure for prisoners to prove their innocence even without DNA evidence. The law also allowed compensation for wrongfully-convicted inmates who subsequently proved their innocence.

Medwed’s new book, Prosecution Complex, published by New York University Press, works from the maxim of 18th-century English judge and jurist William Blackstone that, “It’s better that ten guilty persons escape than one innocent suffer.” Medwed’s intent is to show where the nation’s criminal justice system has gone wrong, and how we can get it right, his exploration set against the contemporary backdrop in which United States prisons hold more people than were housed in Stalin’s gulags. . . .

Pre-trial mistakes might have the greatest ripple effects. If you charge someone with a crime, even though the evidence is very weak, that sets the case in motion. If a prosecutor does not turn over all exculpatory evidence, it creates a situation where the defendant may be enticed by a plea-bargain. . . .

Prosecutors, the overwhelming majority of them, want to do justice. They come into the profession wanting to do the right thing. But there are so many pressures — cultural, institutional, and political and psychological — that come into bear in prosecution.

Take for example, political pressures. Prosecutors have limited budgets. They’re financially strapped, like all government offices. One way to justify a higher budget is to show that your success with high conviction rates. It’s much harder to show, and more nuanced to demonstrate, that you’re successful when you decline to charge a case. It’s harder to show you’re being tough on crime. Conviction rates become the coin of the realm. The American system of places a premium on winning. . . .

Read more here. Thoughts?

By: Steve Grumm

Here’s a nice piece in the Houston Chronicle about the clinic’s work with local immigrants and refugees who may feel trapped between extraordinary hardship both in the US and in their country of origin.

By 2011, the South Texas College of Law’s Human Trafficking Clinic had scored some major victories.

[Clinic director Naomi] Bang’s students had helped secure visas allowing 15 Vietnamese human trafficking victims to remain in the country. Second- and third-year law students were clamoring to get into the class, and a long waiting list developed for the 10 coveted spots.

That fall, three of those places went to Sheridan Green, a clean-cut father and husband from St. George, Utah; Jamie Lauren Morrison, a former eighth-grade teacher from suburban Cy-Fair; and Sharon Sulami, the Houston-raised daughter of Israeli immigrants.

Educational debt has become a crippling burden for far too many, and especially for those who want to pursue careers in public service. Equal Justice Works provides in depth information on loan repayment assistance programs and relief programs like Income-Based Repayment and Public Service Loan Forgiveness to help everyone pursue the career of their dreams.

Plan Before You Borrow: What You Should Know About Educational Loans BEFORE You Go to Graduate School

Thursday, April 12, 2-3 p.m. EDT

Interested in government or public interest work after graduating? This webinar will help you plan ahead and make sure you can take full advantage of the College Cost Reduction and Access Act, the most significant law affecting public service in a generation.

The webinar will teach you about:

– Taking out the right kind of loans

– Consolidating or reconsolidating your previous student loans

– How the College Cost Reduction and Access Act can free you to pursue a public interest career

Register here.