PSJD Public Interest News Digest – April 27, 2018
Sam Halpert, NALP Director of Public Service Initiatives 
Hello there, interested public! I wish I could tell you that NALP’s Annual Conference is my highlight for you this week–I think it’s certainly provided more than a few highlights for those of us lucky enough to be here. However, the news I want to call your attention to most is Secretary Session’s dramatic reversal of his position on legal support for immigrants, which he announced this week before a Senate oversight committee. (See Immigration, below.) In addition, you’ll likely be interested in a new report out of Delaware showing a dramatic return on investment for legal aid.
In general, it’s been an eventful week. Read on to see what I mean.
See you around,
Sam
Funding
- In Delaware, the Combined Campaign for Justice produced an independent report showing a more than 700% return on investment for the state’s three legal aid providers. The providers are hoping to leverage the study as they seek to reverse cuts to their funding suffered in last year’s state budget.
- In New York, the 2019 State Budget restored over $1m in funding to Neighborhood Legal Services of Buffalo, which the organization had lost the previous year due to an administrative error.
- In Florida, Community Legal Services of Mid-Florida announced it received a $326,000 donation from Liggio Law–a proportion of $4m of unclaimed damage awards in a class action lawsuit.
- At Harvard, Ralph Nader and six other HLS alumni wrote an open letter “asking Law School Dean John F. Manning ‘82 if he intends to publicly respond to a report published last fall that criticizes the school’s commitment to public interest.”
- At Yale, “Professor Judith Resnik, the founding director of the Arthur Liman Center for Public Interest Law at Yale Law School, was selected as a member of the 2018 class of Andrew Carnegie Fellows, awarded to support innovative scholarship on pressing contemporary issues.” The fellowship will allow Professor Resnik to “analyze[] how obligations of democratic states toward people in and out of prison are forged, and why the debilitation that many prison systems impose is beyond what governments should be able to inflict as punishment for crimes.”
Immigration
Access to Justice – Civil
- In Florida, legal aid organizations and private attorneys filed amicus briefs in Marie Ann Glass v. Nationstar Mortgage et al., expressing concern that an unfavorable result “would discourage attorneys from defending homeowners if the lawyers couldn’t collect fees from defeated plaintiffs.”
- In New York, NY, the Right to Counsel NYC Coalition and Catholic Migration Services held a town hall meeting in Queens to explain the details of the city’s new law providing universal access to legal representation in wrongful eviction cases.
- The Hill published an opinion piece advocating in support of efforts in the Senate to provide civil legal aid specifically for veterans.
- In Ontario, community legal clinics across the northern portion of the province announced plans to band together in order to expand services. The new collaboration is called “Advocacy North.”
Access to Justice – Criminal
- In Alberta, criminal defense groups continued their protest of legal aid funding in the province, calling the legal aid program “a starving system.” (See previous coverage of this issue in past weeks of the Digest.)
- In Travis County, TX, the Texas Tribune reported that the county’s indigent defense system still has lawyers working unsustainable caseloads, despite a highly-touted overhaul of the system in 2015.
- BET promoted its new show, “In Contempt”–a courtroom drama it believes will stand out for its decision to represent the work of public defenders. “[Y]ou’ll get a nice peek behind the curtain of their world, to see why these people are fighting, because it’s not for the money, because they’re underfinanced, they’re understaffed, they’re underinformed.”