Yesterday, U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder spoke at the Lyndon B. Johnson Library & Museum in Austin, Texas about the Voting Rights Act and the reality that there are jurisdictions across the country that use “both overt and subtle forms of [voter] discrimination.”

Watch a video of his speech here. Or read his speech here.

Calling all bike-ridin’, vegan-eatin’, no-leather-wearin’, tree-plantin’ earthy types!  Vermont Law, one of the powerhouse educational institutions for environmental law, has released its Top 10 Environmental Watch List, 2012 Edition.  Here’s a tease:

1. With Republicans Attacking the EPA, 2012 Could Be a Turning Point for Environmental Regulation…
2. EPA and White House Clash over Ozone Standards…
3. Powder River Basin’s Abundance of Coal at the Epicenter of Energy Development…

Equal Justice Works is hosting a live, free webinar this Friday. Mark your calendars!

Drowning in Debt? Learn How Government and Nonprofit Workers Can Earn Public Service Loan Forgiveness

December 16, 3:00 – 4:15 p.m. EDT

A must-attend for anyone with high student debt working for the government or a nonprofit, this free webinar explains how you can benefit from the College Cost Reduction and Access Act, the most significant law affecting public service in a generation.

From this interactive webinar, you will learn and be able to ask questions about:

• Understanding your Federal loans
• How to qualify for Public Service Loan Forgiveness
• How the Income-Based Repayment plan works

Click here to view a schedule of EJW’s free, live webinars that teach you how loan repayment assistance and relief programs work, and to register for an upcoming session.

The Skadden Foundation has listed its Class-of-2012 fellows.  Twenty-eight fellows, hailing from 16 law schools, will begin their projects next year.  Seven schools had multiple fellowship awardees: Berkeley (2); Columbia (2); Harvard (6); NYU (2); Penn (2); Stanford (3); and Yale (2).  Other schools from which fellows come include CUNY, Georgetown, Michigan, and Rutgers-Camden.

For comparison’s sake, prior Skadden Fellowship classes shaped up as follows:

• 2011:  29 fellows from 21 law schools;
• 2010: 27 fellows from 20 law schools;
• 2009: 28 fellows from 14 law schools;
• 2008: 36 fellows from 16 law schools.  

Congrats to the Class-of-2012 fellows!  The fellowship award is an extraordinary achievement. 

By: Steve Grumm

We may soon find out.  Tomorrow the Missouri Supreme Court will hear arguments in a long-simmering case about whether the Missouri Public Defender Commission is empowered to close offices to new cases on account of high caseloads.  While this decision will of course impact only Missouri’s indigent defense system, the problem of under-funded, overwhelmed defenders offices exists in many jurisdictions.

From the Springfield News-Leader:

Public defenders say they were operating under the rules set up after a previous Supreme Court decision.

But multiple interpretations have surfaced as to what the previous Supreme Court ruling, called the Pratte decision, actually means.

The Missouri Public Defender Commission’s opinion is that the Pratte decision reaffirmed its authority to set rules to combat high caseloads. It also said public defenders couldn’t reject cases based on category, such as turning down all probation violation cases.

In the Pratte opinion, one of the suggestions justices made was to consider closing the offices to new cases when caseload limits were reached, as other states have done.

But the sides disagree about whether that text gave the authority to close offices or was merely a discussion of options.

The new case before the Supreme Court could clarify how the court expects public defenders to deal with high caseloads.

By: Steve Grumm

Happy Friday, dear readers.  Greetings from day two of the National Legal Aid & Defender Association’s annual conference.  (It’s their centennial, in fact.  Happy 100th, NLADA!)  There is much terrific programming here.  It’s heartening to learn of so many innovative approaches to delivering high-quality client services.  And it’s great to catch up with friends and colleagues from the legal services community.  But the dire funding circumstances which legal services providers – and defenders, for that matter – face are part of most conversations I’ve had.  So there is much to celebrate, but some things to lament as well.   

This week: legal services funding woes in North Carolina; ditto in Ohio; a “Justice Index” to measure the health of court systems?; an access-to-justice report in New York State.

• 12.8.11 – here’s a look at how funding woes impact legal services in North Carolina: “On Nov. 15, Congress cut $56 million from the federal Legal Services Corporation for 2012. This cut is as plain as it is severe: federal support specifically for the provision of legal services to low-income people will drop by 15 percent next year. In North Carolina, these cuts will directly reduce funding by about $1.5 million.  The full picture is worse. Federal legal services funds for North Carolina were cut by $700,000 this year. Our state legislature sliced 25 percent from legal aid budgets this year. These cuts forced LANC to shut down four offices across the state and eliminate 30 staff positions. The 2012 cuts will likely cause more reductions in staff and services next year.”  Read the full op-ed in the Charlotte Observer. 

• 12.7.11 – bad news from Ohio: “Legal Aid of Western Ohio, Inc. (LAWO) announced it will close its Mansfield office due to severe funding cuts. The closing will also result in the elimination of two attorney positions and one administrative assistant position in the Mansfield office.  The closing is scheduled to take place by December 31, 2011.”  Here’s the story from WMFD. 

• 12.5.11 – a “Justice Index” to measure the health and effectiveness of state court systems?  Writing in the National Law Journal, David Udell and Cara Anna of the National Center for Access to Justice at Cardozo Law propose using data to help policymakers find solutions to access-to-justice problems: “Which states’ courts are in the worst condition? Which, despite the challenges, are making litigation simpler and less expensive? It’s hard to fix a problem when you can’t see clearly what’s going wrong. There’s no way to tell how one state’s legal system is performing or how it compares with others. It’s time to change that. We need a national Justice Index.  A Justice Index follows on the innovative idea by Yale law professor Heather Gerken of creating a Democracy Index to evaluate America’s election system. A national Justice Index would be a high-profile annual ranking of each state’s approach to legal assistance and the way each handles civil and criminal cases. That ranking would be supported by published data that could be mined by policymakers, the media and the courts themselves.”

• 12.2.11 – the Task Force to Expand Access to Civil Legal Services released a report about the state of AtJ in the Empire State.  From Thomson-Reuters: Access to civil legal services for low-income New Yorkers is severely lacking, which not only impacts the livelihood of poor litigants but drains precious resources from the state’s court system, according to a new report released by a task force created by the state’s chief judge.  ‘At best, no more than 20 percent of the legal needs of low-income families and individuals are met, because civil legal services providers lack the resources to meet them,’ says the report issued Thursday by the Task Force to Expand Access to Civil Legal Services.”  Here’s a link to the Task Force’s report. 

by Kristen Pavón

From the Florida Constitution:

The education of children is a fundamental value of the people of the State of Florida. It is, therefore, a paramount duty of the state to make adequate provision for the education of all children residing within its borders. Adequate provision shall be made by law for a uniform, efficient, safe, secure, and high quality system of free public schools that allows students to obtain a high quality education and for the establishment, maintenance, and operation of institutions of higher learning and other public education programs that the needs of the people may require. . . .

Two years ago, Southern Legal Counsel (SLC) in Florida filed a lawsuit, on behalf of two nonprofits, two students and four parents, alleging deficiencies in the public education system that violate the state’s constitutional duty (as described above).

A couple of weeks ago, the First District Court of Appeals issued an En Banc Order denying the state’s motion for a writ of prohibition, and certifying a question of public importance to the Florida Supreme Court — the question being whether the education clause in the state’s constitution sets forth judicially ascertainable standards that can be used to determine the adequacy, efficiency, safety, security and high quality of public education on a statewide basis.

SLC alleges that Florida has failed to adequately fulfill its duty by providing insufficient funding for public education, shifting responsibility for educational funding to local governments, providing inadequate resources for teachers‘ salaries in particular, and adopting a so-called accountability policy that is an obstacle to high quality.

Additionally, SLC alleges that Florida’s public schools are not safe and secure, that graduation rates are too low, that student promotion and retention policies are ineffective and that results of achievement tests reveal various inadequacies.

I’m interested to see how this case turns out. You can read more about SLC’s work here.

Thoughts?

by Kristen Pavón

An excellently written blog post titled Sweet Home Alabama? Immigration and Civil Rights in the “New South,“ popped up today on HuffPost by Kevin R. Johnson, a professor at UC Davis Law.

Johnson doesn’t get into the details of Alabama’s harsh immigration law, but he illustrates similarities between the state’s intolerance to undocumented immigrants and Latinos today and to African-Americans in the 1960s.

It should be troubling that Alabama, ground zero in the civil rights movement of the 1960s, gave birth to the harshest immigration law to date. Many famous incidents in that state — from Birmingham Police Chief Bull Connor unleashing fire hoses on peaceful civil rights marchers to Governor George Wallace proclaiming “segregation now, segregation forever” in his 1963 inaugural address — remain indelibly imprinted on the national imagination. As in the days when segregationists championed “states’ rights,” we again hear objections to the intervention of the federal government as it attempts to defend immigrants’ civil rights through lawsuits challenging state immigration laws. Alabama now risks going down in history for its intolerance toward undocumented immigrants and Latinos as well as African-Americans.

Additionally, Johnson posits that we are at a civil rights crossroads and we must start making some decision about how we want to treat immigrants. Our ambivalence will only breed more turmoil.

…In my estimation, the United States, much as it was in the 1960s, is at a civil rights crossroads. Millions of immigrants and undocumented immigrants live in the United States. Employers value their labor. Consumers gain from lower prices. The economy as a whole benefits. But legally, the nation has been at best ambivalent about how to treat immigrants, especially undocumented ones, in the eyes of the law. Most fundamentally, what rights do they possess? We as a nation must address these civil rights questions. Until then, we can expect more turmoil in the states and, consequently, continued threats to the civil rights of immigrants and U.S. citizens of particular national origins.

Read his entire post here, or read his law review article, full of great primary secondary source citations, here.

By: Steve Grumm

A piece in the National Law Journal, penned by folks from the National Center for Access to Justice at Cardozo Law, proposes using hard data to track the health and effectiveness of state court systems.

America’s justice system should not be a mystery, and its workings should be open and understandable to all. But that ideal is far from the truth.

Millions of people each year come to civil court to fight for their homes, their businesses, their families. Many can’t afford a lawyer, and states aren’t required to give them one. Legal aid groups turn away more than half of the people who come asking. The funding simply doesn’t exist. Even in the criminal justice system, with its constitutional right to counsel, we still see “lawyerless courts” where people are arraigned and jailed on their own.

Of course, it’s not just about having a lawyer, and it’s not just about the poor. In these tough financial times, are courts even functioning? An American Bar Association report in August said courts in most states have seen budget cuts of 10 to 15 percent during the past three years. “The same recession that has led legislatures to reduce access to our justice system has obviously increased the number of people who need it,” the report said.

Which states’ courts are in the worst condition? Which, despite the challenges, are making litigation simpler and less expensive? It’s hard to fix a problem when you can’t see clearly what’s going wrong. There’s no way to tell how one state’s legal system is performing or how it compares with others. It’s time to change that. We need a national Justice Index.

A Justice Index follows on the innovative idea by Yale law professor Heather Gerken of creating a Democracy Index to evaluate America’s election system. A national Justice Index would be a high-profile annual ranking of each state’s approach to legal assistance and the way each handles civil and criminal cases. That ranking would be supported by published data that could be mined by policymakers, the media and the courts themselves.

…

by Kristen Pavón

I attended a Center for American Progress panel discussion about the results of a recent poll of young adults between 18 and 34 on their economic situation and expectations. The poll asked young adults about 1) jobs and the economy, 2) higher education, 3) health care and wellness, 4) cost of living, and 5) raising a family.

The panelists were:

• Jamelle Bouie (moderator), Knobler Fellow at The Nation Institute
• Ronnie Cho, White House Liaison to Young Americans
• Eduardo Garcia, Advocacy Associate for Campus Progress
• Heather McGhee, Demos’s D.C. office Director
• Aaron Smith, Young Invincibles co-founder and Executive Director

Unfortunately, but not surprisingly, the results were mostly dismal. However, we (young adults) are still hopeful despite the current outlook. The panelists stressed the importance of young adults getting involved in policy work and becoming leaders in their communities to create change.

Here are few of the numbers from the poll:

• 68% of respondents believe that it has become harder to make ends meet over the last four years.
• 48% of respondents believe that their generation will be worse off than their parents.
• 77% believe they can achieve the “American Dream.”
• 57% say they would like to be working and earning more.
• 44% of workers have taken jobs outside of their fields while waiting for a better opportunity.
• Almost 40% say they have delayed starting or continuing college or training because of the economy.
• Education or training was cited as the most important factor to getting ahead in the economy.
• 27% are uninsured.
• 52% described their personal financial situations as just fair or poor (Latinos are the most frustrated with their financial situation).

Here are young adults’ top 5 priorities, according to the the poll results:

1. Creating jobs and growing the economy
2. Making college affordable
3. Making post-high school education and training more affordable
4. Protecting health care services and access for low-income people
5. Making sure social security is available for people in our generation

Wondering what issue came in last as a top priority for young adults?

• Reducing the federal debt by cutting spending on entitlements (I found this interesting and maybe even telling of our/my generation).

Policy Solutions

While the panelists used a lot of idealistic language like “tremendous opportunities,” “powerful energy,” and “hopeful,” I was happy to hear some tangible solutions to improving Young America’s economic future.

• Student loan relief for young entrepreneurs
• Reform eligibility for student loans and programs for ex-convicts
• Implementation of a large public jobs bill (for workers to improve national parks/roads/etc)
• Reform eligibility for Earned Income Tax Credit to include young adults under 25
• Establish a universal system of childcare
• Implement guaranteed paid leave policy (FMLA leave almost half of employees uncovered because of small employers or their leave is unpaid)

Watch the webcast of the event here.

Pretty interesting stuff. What do you think?