PSJD Public Interest News Digest – February 2, 2018
Sam Halpert, NALP Director of Public Service Initiatives
Hello there, interested public! The biggest story below is at the top of the civil A2J section, but there’s a different piece of news I want to call your particular attention to this week:
- NALP has launched the 2018 Public Service Attorney Salary Survey. For the first time since 2014, we are studying salaries and benefits for attorneys at public service organizations across the county. To ensure that our eventual report (to be released later this year) is as useful as possible, I hope that everyone will help me by sharing the survey link (www.psjd.org/salarysurvey) with their networks and encouraging as many organizations as possible to contribute to this study. We are already hearing back from participating organizations eager to learn the results, so hopefully you would be doing your contacts a favor to pass this along. (Here are some more details about this study, from the last time we published this report.)
Until next week,
Sam
Student Loans
- The National Center for Educational Statistics published a new dataset covering student borrowing patterns for 2015-2016.
- A veterinary news site detailed the effect of proposed changes to Public Service Loan Forgiveness on that profession.
Legal Technology
- AboveTheLaw published the second part of its examination of “How to Reboot the Justice System on Technology.”
Access to Justice – Civil
- The New York Times reported on the Justice Department’s quiet starvation of its Office for Access to Justice, an Obama-era initiative responsible for (among other things) launching the White House Legal Aid Interagency Roundtable and filing statements of interest in a variety of cases involving the criminalization of poverty.
- In Oklahoma, the State Supreme Court created a commission to investigate new models for providing indigent civil legal aid.
- The 9th Circuit held that “neither the Due Process Clause nor the Immigration & Nationality Act creates a categorical right to court-appointed counsel at government expense for alien minors.” The ACLU of Southern California called the ruling “a brutal decision.“
- In San Francisco, tenant advocacy groups assembled enough signatures to put a measure on the ballot proposing legal counsel for all renters in the city facing eviction.
Access to Justice – Criminal
- In Florida, the State’s Attorney’s Office has created Florida’s first conviction integrity review unit.
- In Wisconsin, a State Public Defender wrote an op-ed arguing that increasing pay for private attorneys who accept public defense cases is crucial to upholding Wisconsin’s Constitution.
- In Michigan, “many local governments have been asked to resubmit financial requests [related to new standards for indigent legal defense] that are being drafted and reviewed for the first time.“
- In Montana, “[s]tate budget cuts mean the Office of the State Public Defender is freezing salaries and reducing pay to contractors.“
- In Idaho, the ACLU won class action status for its lawsuit against the state’s allegedly defective public defense system.
- In New York City, the Legal Aid Society launched a prison book drive to furnish inmates with copies of “The New Jim Crow.”