PSJD Public Interest News Digest – February 16, 2018
Sam Halpert, NALP Director of Public Service Initiatives
Hello there, interested public! If you read one thing this week, I’d check out the pull quote from Missouri’s top public defender–it speaks directly to issues of public service salaries & hiring.
And speaking of public service salaries…
- NALP is still collecting responses for 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 the eventual reports is as useful as possible, it would be so helpful if everyone could share the survey link (www.psjd.org/salarysurvey) with their networks and encourage organizations to contribute to this study. In particular, we could use more responses from public defenders in the Northeast and Midwest and from issue-specific organizations in the Northeast. (If you’re curious, here are some more details about this study, from the last time we published this report.)
Until next week,
Sam
Student Loans
- US News reported that House Republicans’ plans to overhaul the federal student loan program may deter law applicants.
- In Virginia, “legislators are seeking to mitigate the personal and economic consequences of their constituents’ student loan debt by creating a state-level ombudsman to troubleshoot problems and educate borrowers regarding college loans.“
- CBS’ MoneyWatch program and New York Magazine picked up the Levy Economics Institute Report on Student Debt Amnesty (released earlier this month and featured in a prior edition of this bulletin).
- In a counter-point to the Levy Institute’s study, the American Benefits Center suggested that borrowers focus on currently available options for income-based repayment.
- At a conference for investors in distressed assets, the CEO of consumer advisory-firm Distill warned that millennials are “the most frugal demographic since the so-called Greatest Generation that came of age during the depression…largely because of the huge student-debt cloud that hangs over them.“
Legal Technology
- “CuroLegal, a company that designs and develops technology for the legal industry, has launched CuroStudio, a venture studio with a special focus on developing tools and services to address the access-to-justice gap and improve the delivery of legal services.“
- FCW published a solid overview of the CLOUD Act and civil liberties’ groups concern over it. The act seeks to clarify law enforcement’s ability to access data stored overseas and potentially preempt legal questions raised in US v. Microsoft.
Access to Justice – Civil
- In Idaho, the Office of Performance Evaluation reported that the state’s legally-mandated system for providing representation to children involved in protective services cases failed to provide a guardian ad litem or a public defender in roughly a third of the 2017 cases their study sampled.
Access to Justice – Criminal
- In Missouri, the state’s public defender director said that his office has hundreds fewer attorneys than it needs–and that his departments’ starting salaries make it impossible to employ attorneys:
- In California, NBC reporting revealed that budget cuts to courts have created a situation in which “thousands of felony criminal cases have been delayed for years, and sometimes even decades, in jurisdictions around California.“
- Also in California, Public Defenders in Los Angeles County held a rally to protest the Board of Supervisors’ choice of an interim head Public Defender they say has no experience defending poor, needy clients.