Sam Halpert, NALP Director of Public Service Initiatives

Hi everyone!

Regular readers of our Public Interest News Digest may have noticed that we discontinued our weekly dispatches for a couple months over the summer. Since the Digest made its return this fall, I’ve hinted a few times that big changes were underway for PSJD.org.

I’m excited that beginning tomorrow morning you’ll be able to see where our time has been going in recent months. Visitors to PSJD.org tomorrow will find a whole new layout! Each page on PSJD has been re-designed based on common questions and problems we’ve encountered over the years when working with jobseekers and employers. Our hope is that the new site will feel more consistent, more immediate, and more intuitive for users.

Many things will change. In this post I’ll call your attention to just a few examples.

More Consistent

Throughout the site, we’ve looked at the different ways in which similar features have been presented in the past and worked to provide a single, predictable experience.

On today’s PSJD.org, when jobseekers and school administrators log in they’re able to bookmark the site’s content so that they can refer to it later. This goes for their search results and also for individual job notices, employer profiles, and resources in the resource library. But when you want to create a bookmark in each of these places, the button you need to press has a different label depending on which type of page you’re bookmarking–and is located in a different spot on each type of page as well.

On tomorrow’s PSJD.org, every type of page that can be bookmarked will have a bookmark button in the same place. So once you know where to look, you’ll never have to wonder if you’re missing something.

More Immediate

In the time since PSJD.org was last updated, the web has changed a lot. New options are available that make sites more immediately responsive.

On today’s PSJD.org, if you want to select a city from search returns, you have to scroll down a long list of checkboxes and hunt for it. If you want to reset your password, you visit a separate page from the one you were hoping to access and then must navigate back to where you were.

On tomorrow’s PSJD.org, search results can be refined with select boxes where as soon as you begin typing the option you’re looking for the list of results will narrow to only the possibilities you care about. When you ask for a new password, the form you need will appear in a popup, so you can make your request and then get right back to what you were doing.

More Intuitive

In phone conversations and via email over the years, we’ve developed a pretty good sense of which parts of PSJD do things that our users don’t expect. With this update, we’ve worked to eliminate these areas of confusion wherever possible. We hope the new site will do more to explain what is happening–and why–for users on the platform.

On today’s PSJD, we use icons to communicate concepts, like a rolling deadline or an archival job post.

On tomorrow’s PSJD, whenever you encounter an icon button, you can hover on it (or long-press) to get some explanatory text that will let you know what that button does. Status messages, which before were sometimes buried in the main text of the page in ways that users did not always notice, should be more obvious.

On today’s PSJD, if you want to understand how to use the platform you can download a PDF from the “About PSJD” section and follow along. (Or, of course, send us an email or give us a call.)

On tomorrow’s PSJD, pages will contain an ‘?’ button. When you press it, you’ll get a tutorial on how to use the portion of the site you’re currently viewing that’s specific to your user type (e.g., jobseeker or employer).

So if you load PSJD.org tomorrow and things look a bit different, try the tour! And of course, even though we hope it will be easier for you to find your way around without getting in touch we are still happy to answer your emails and take your calls.

Hope you enjoy the new site,
Sam

Sam Halpert, NALP Director of Public Service Initiatives

Hello there, interested public! I’m writing to you live from this year’s annual NLADA Conference; expect to hear more about that in next week’s digest. This week, most stories sound in student loans, with news concerning virtually every aspect of the educational finance system. Also, be sure to read all the way to the end for big news out of Canada concerning civil access to justice.

Until next week,
Sam

Student Loans

• The House of Representatives introduced legislation to renew the Higher Education Act of 1965 which includes a revision to the statute eliminating Public Service Loan Forgiveness.
• In the wake of the new bill’s announcement, Credible.com published an analysis of how proposed changes might affect borrowers.
• The African-American Intellectual History Society examined the historic effects of student loan policies on African-Americans.
• Salon reported that “the total size of student loan debt is now $1.3 trillion — roughly the same size as the U.S. high-yield corporate bond market.”
• In DC Superior Court, a judge ordered a company that defrauded students of loan payments to pay a $233,000 fine and $192,824.95 in refunds to 233 city customers.
• Meanwhile, at the state level, loan repayment assistance is catching on in a variety of ways.
• And finally, Inside Philanthropy discussed how a number of high-profile gifts to universities indicate “the growing influence of private dollars in public education in an era when legislatures have cut back support for state university systems.”

Disaster Legal Aid

• In Puerto Rico, legal services and pro bono attorneys are working to help families living on properties passed across generations without formal title as they struggle to access FEMA benefits.
• The Legal Aid Center of Southern Nevada created a financial toolkit for viciims of the recent shooting in Las Vegas; these people have found themselves the target of confidence scams designed to bilk them of their shares of the Compassion Fund.
• Attorneys in Northern California have been working pro bono to assist victims of the recent wildfires there.

Access to Justice – Criminal

• The Baltimore, MD public defender’s office increased its estimate of the number of cases affected by recent racketeering charges against Baltimore Police officers, saying more than 2,000 cases may be compromised.
• Oakland County and St. Clair County, MI joined fellow counties in the state in submitting a budget plan for indigent defense in order to comply with new standards set by the Michigan Indigent Defense Commission.
• In Winnebago County, IL, a judge ordered the county board to restore $326,852 to the county’s budget, saying that the cuts compromise court services and threaten public safety.
• In Nashville, TN, the chief public defender and chief prosecutor clashed as the defender’s office advocates for alternatives to cash bail; Civil Rights Corps recently sent a letter to Nashville’s top attorney threatening a lawsuit over the city’s “two-tiered system of justice.”

Access to Justice – Civil

• The Law Society of Upper Canada “approved, in principle, an action plan to help improve access to justice for Ontario families. The plan includes establishing a special licence for paralegals and others with appropriate training, to offer some family law legal services.”

Music Bonus!

Something cinematic, I think:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6tvUPFsaj5s<//a>

Sam Halpert, NALP Director of Public Service Initiatives

Hello there, interested public! Hope you all enjoyed Thanksgiving. Recent news concerning our community involves a few themes, including strategic disputes when considering court reforms (cash bail and right to council in eviction cases, in California), concerns about the Sixth Amendment (in South Carolina and California, again), and the role of technology in access to justice (in Ontario and among law schools).

Welcome to December,
Sam

Student Loans

• The New York Times profiled states’ practice of suspending professional licenses–including law licenses–as a penalty for graduates who fall into arrears on their student debt.

Immigration

• In New York City, about 100 public defenders protested outside the criminal courthouse against ICE’s continuing arrests of individuals making local court appearances.

Access to Justice – Criminal

• The Huffington Post drew nation-wide parallels between far-flung disputes over indigent defense shortfalls in Missouri, Louisiana, and Nevada (covered previously in the Digest) as well as in several other states.
• In Oskaloosa, Iowa, the city council approved an ordinance eliminating jail penalties for many city ordinances in order to reduce the cost of its indigent defense program.
• In Louisiana, funding for indigent defense in capital cases ran out for the year and defenders’ offices began refusing clients.
• In California, a dispute arose around how best to reform problems with cash bail, as San Francisco’s chief Public Defender criticized the state judiciary for expressing an interest in moving to an algorithm-based system for determining whom to remand and whom to release in criminal cases, as popular support builds for a state bill that would provide “widespread release for all misdemeanors and low-level felonies.”
• In South Carolina, the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court issued a memo ordering lower court judges to stop issuing bench warrants for traffic violations because these warrants often resulted in Sixth Amendment violations.
• West Virginia University College of Law received a five-year grant of $100,000 from Wilson, Frame, and Metheny to fund its Innocence Project clinic.

Access to Justice – Civil

• The Ontario Attorney General announced “Putting Justice Within Reach: The Foundation for User-Focused Justice in Ontario,” a roadmap for digitizing justice services and streamlining court processes in the province to increase access to justice. Legal Aid Ontario also officially launched its legal advice phone hotline after a 10-week soft-launch.
• Professor Dan Linna (of Michigan State University), the Director of The Center for Legal Services Innovation, argued in an interview discussing his Center’s new “Legal Services Innovation Index” that “[the legal profession] must innovate and think big, especially in law school” in order to solve the United States’ access to justice problem.
• In a three-part opinion column, a California attorney argued that differences in the relative size of federal judicial districts in California, when compared with similar areas on the eastern seaboard, effectively means that “Californian’s [sic] have second class status when it comes to having access to federal justice.”
• The ABA, the Veterans Consortium, and the National Law School Veterans Clinic Consortium joined the Department of Veterans’ Affairs in a memorandum of agreement facilitating veterans’ access to pro bono legal services–ideally through existing VA facilities.

• As San Francisco, California, moves toward a right to council in eviction cases a dispute has arisen between a grassroots proposal and a more narrowly-drawn right promoted by members of the City Council.
• CityLandNYC covered a panel discussion held earlier in November covering New York City’s new law providing a right to council in eviction cases.

Music Bonus!

All that, and a trombone:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DxmDKtAvqpM

Sam Halpert, NALP Director of Public Service Initiatives

Editor’s Pick: “As Dust Settles, Law School Rises”
(UVA Law Responds to Charlottesville)

Okay folks. If you only read one article in the digest this week, make it this one. It’s packed with both personal and professional perspectives from those students, faculty, and administrators most publicly and painfully tested by the civic challenges confronting our campuses.

In other protest-related news:

• Students and faculty at Georgetown Law staged an NFL-inspired protest of Attorney General Sessions’ campus lecture on freedom of speech–a closed event organized by the Georgetown Center for the Constitution.
• University of Pennsylvania students silently protested outside a campus lecture by Heather Mac Donald, author of “The War on Cops,” organized by the Penn Law Federalist Society.
• Students at Harvard law are preparing to protest an upcoming visit by Secretary of Education DeVos.

DACA/Immigration

• “The National Association of Latino Elected and Appointed Officials (NALEO) Educational Fund, Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law, and Association of Pro Bono Counsel (APBCo) announced a new partnership Monday to match young people applying for temporary status with local clinics and pro bono volunteers who can help navigate the process.“
• Graduate and undergraduate student assemblies at the University of Pennsylvania issued a joint statement calling on the University to provide or arrange legal representation for DACA recipients studying at Penn.
• InsidePhilanthrophy summarizes the way major funders are responding to the Trump Administration’s decision to end the DACA program.
• After the 5th Circuit overturned a lower court decision that had blocked a Texas law directing local law enforcement to hold inmates past their release dates at the request of federal officials executing immigration policy, sheriffs in Travis County, TX announced they will begin honoring these detainer requests.
• Baylor Law’s Immigration Clinic has created a DACA Renewal Clinic.

Student Loans & Consumer Law

• 21 state Attorneys General have written a letter to Secretary of Education DeVos, demanding she halt what the Pennsylvania Attorney General called “a systemic rollback of critical protections for student borrowers.”

• New FTC website calls attention to its “Military Task Force,” which provides consumer law services to servicemembers, veterans, and their families.
• A CFPB spokesperson outlined legal authority which the agency could conceivably use to punish Equifax for its recent loss of sensitive personal data on 143 million Americans, although he declined to comment on whether the agency was in fact conducting any investigation into the data breach.

Civil Access to Justice

First, the news from Canada:

• A recent decision by Legal Aid Alberta to charge prospective clients up-front deposits has lasted less than a week; an Alberta Justice Minister has asked legal aid to put a hold on this plan, while the Edmonton Criminal Trial Lawyers Association has strongly criticized the provincial government for under-funding legal services.
• The British Columbia Court of Appeal upheld legislation requiring civil litigants opting for a jury trial to pay for expenses related to the jury process.
• Calgary Legal Guidance’s second annual “Advice-a-Thon” organized dozens of Calgary lawyers to provide complimentary brief advice and non-government issued photo identification to city residents outside Calgary City Hall; organizers for the event used it to call attention to the large numbers of people with incomes too high to qualify for legal aid but too low to afford traditional representation.
• Legal Aid Ontario announces plans to open new clinic to serve Ontario’s Black community, replacing the African Canadian Legal Clinic–from which LAO withdrew funding last summer.

And now, the United States:

• New York State’s Office of Indigent Legal Services has asked counties to submit plans for overhauling and expanding their public defense services–a project expected to cost $250 million annually by 2023–as the state works to respond to systemic problems brought to light in a lawsuit by the New York Civil Liberties Union.
• University of Cincinnati College of Law has created a courthouse navigator program in partnership with Ohio county courts and at the recommendation of the Ohio Supreme Court’s Task Force on Access to Justice.
• Professor John McGinnis of Northwestern Law criticized the AALS’ decision to oppose the ABA’s proposal that accredited law schools be permitted to allow adjunct faculty to teach any or all 2L and 3L courses, arguing it hinders access to justice initiatives by preventing law schools from training new lawyers more affordably.

Criminal Justice

• Politico profiles the burgeoning conservative movement in support of better funding for public defender services which frames PD offices as a crucial check on government power.
• A Yolo County, CA Board of Supervisors meeting yielded an admirably fruitful, detailed discussion of different ways to understand the needs and workloads of Public Defenders Offices, how to gauge whether PD offices are adequately staffed, and how local governments must adapt staffing for both PD and DA offices in response to changes in the law.
• Spokane County, WA is contemplating a 7% reduction in funding to both its DA and PD offices. Prosecutors believe the cut would force them to stop prosecuting felony drug possession cases and citations for driving on suspended licenses; defenders are more sanguine about the situation.

Music Bonus!

If you’re still searching for your groove this year, you might try this one:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r6AN1-CTUXM

This past week the PSJD Pro Bono Publico Award Committee made some tough decisions regarding which of the many exemplary nominees would advance as finalists. These choices were difficult to say the least, as the pool of applicants was particularly talented this year. The committee is proud to announce that the following finalists:

The Place: On September 23rd and 24th, University of California will again host its inaugural Public Service Law Conference at UCLA’s Luskin Center.

By: Brittany Swett, J.D.

As many of you know, the Trump administration’s proposed budget called for completely eliminating funding for LSC. Congress has the final say on appropriations, and it appears that at least some in Congress are in favor of a reduction in LSC funding. Below is a message from the National Legal Aid & Defender Association regarding Legal Services Corporation (LSC) funding for FY’18, and how you can act to tell Congress any reduction in LSC funding is a mistake.

From the National Legal Aid & Defender Association:

As you may know, the U.S. House Appropriations Subcommittee on Commerce, Justice, Science, and Related Agencies last week approved a spending package that would cut funding for Legal Services Corporation (LSC) grantees by 24 percent. This would impose unacceptable budget cuts that would force grantees to severely curtail services and potentially even close offices. At the same time, the White House and some in Congress appear to remain committed to eliminating LSC.

That is why I wanted to let you know about www.ActOnJustice.org, which provides information, fact sheets, and talking points about LSC and civil legal aid, which you may find useful for your own advocacy. The key purpose of the site however, is to give individuals a quick and simple way to contact their own elected officials to advocate for LSC.

With so many competing spending priorities facing Congress, it is vital that we demonstrate the depth of support for LSC that exists within members’ own constituencies. I would like to ask that you help achieve this by using the site and sharing it broadly throughout your networks. This effort will be most effective if it includes a cross section of stakeholder groups, particularly: (1) clients and former clients, (2) public interest advocates who work with populations that routinely experience civil legal needs, (3) private and corporate lawyers, particularly those that have experience working with legal services programs pro bono, and (4) law students and law school faculty.

Please note: if you receive LSC funds, you are prohibited from using this site for grassroots lobbying. However, the site does include other resources and updates you might find useful.

The national response to the White House recommendation to eliminate LSC has been deeply impactful, and with appropriations bills currently being drafted and considered in Congress, now is the time to elevate the voice of communities and constituents in a more coordinated way. Where permitted, please link to the site in your upcoming communications, and start a conversation using #ActOnJustice on Facebook and Twitter.

Thank you for helping to make sure that LSC continues to be protected, and that the clients of its grantees continue to receive access to justice.

David

DAVID MILLER, Manager, Policy Initiatives

www.nlada.org  |  D.Miller@nlada.org  |  (202) 452-0620 ext: 244

1901 Pennsylvania Avenue, NW Suite 500, Washington DC 20006

The notice below applies to the DC metro area, but please be aware, it could be happening in your areas as well.  Please be cautious and know your rights.  If you have a concern, there are pro bono attorneys available to assist you. You can find them through your state bar volunteer lawyers program, local legal aid, OneJustice’s Immigration Pro Bono Response Network, probono.net, and others.

Message from Ayuda:

Good afternoon,

We’re very concerned about a potential uptick in ICE impersonators in the DC metro area.

Advocates have reported several fake search/arrest warrants distributed to at least three DC residences. The victims were not extorted, and we’re unclear of the motives behind these fake warrants. You can refer any additional victims of ICE impostors to Maya Del Pilar Zegarra and me at Ayuda at 202-552-3604 or to end@ayuda.com. We are in touch with local law enforcement in DC to encourage them to investigate this matter.

In addition, as you may have seen, a Maryland resident was arrested in February for posing as an ICE officer. Law enforcement reportedly seized ten weapons, a police badge, body armor, etc. from his Gaithersburg home and allege that he impersonated ICE while “patrolling” Falls Church, VA.
http://wjla.com/news/local/sources-wash-post-employee-allegedly-impersonated-ice-agent-guns-found-at-his-md-home

We encourage you to spread these warnings to your clients and community.
1. U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) and Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) will never ask for payment over the phone nor in person as a bribe, or to expedite your application, or to extract special favors from the government.
2. ICE agents are prohibited from entering a home without a warrant signed by a judge. If they have an order, you can ask them to pass it under the door.

Thanks,
Anne

Anne Schaufele
Ayuda Project END Coordinator & Immigration Staff Attorney
202.552.3604 office
www.ayuda.com | annes@ayuda.com