Last year Rhode Island Legal Services (RILS) and the Rhode Island  affiliate of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU-RI) collaborated to advocate on behalf of special education students and their parents.

The organizations filed a “class-action administrative civil rights complaint [with the U.S. Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights] challenging [the Pawtucket School District’s] practice of routinely destroying documents related to the evaluations conducted to determine whether a child has a disability, and if so, the nature of the educational services needed by that child. The documents that were being destroyed included the notes and observations of the evaluators, the children’s answer sheets, and other raw data on which the school’s final written reports were based. As a result, parents never had the opportunity to review the documents that led to determinations regarding a child’s special education needs and services.”

Under a settlement reached in late December, “the school district has agreed to develop a policy to retain all the evaluation documents it had previously been destroying; to notify parents of their right to review those documents; to offer to conduct new special education evaluations of students in those instances where the documents had been destroyed; and to provide training to all staff about the new policies. The agreement also sets a timeframe for meeting all of these requirements, which the Office of Civil Rights ‘will monitor until fully implemented.””

RILS attorney Veronika Kot said,  “Parents of children with disabilities are equal participants in decision making about the services their children may need to achieve good educational outcomes. They have the right to full and equal access to the information that forms the basis for such decisions. The resolution of this complaint is a welcome reaffirmation of these rights.”

RI ACLU volunteer attorney Amy R. Tabor added: “This resolution sends a message to all school districts in Rhode Island that they cannot adopt document-destruction or document-withholding policies that deprive parents of their right to full access to their child’s educational records.”

In light of this agreement, the organizations are also advocating that the U.S. DOE issue a reminder to all districts that they are “obligated by federal law to keep evaluation documents and to allow parents to access them.”

It has not been a stellar week for finding good news – the Tucson, Arizona shootings and the reporting this week on the challenges still facing the people of Haiti as they strive to overcome the tragic earthquake of January 12, 2010.  The PSLawNet Blog was heartened to read today about the pro bono work of a Rutgers University School of Law-Newark alum, Ralph Delouis.  Following the earthquake last year,

Delouis put his skills and expertise to work to help implement a long-term plan to stimulate the country’s economy. One year later, Delouis is being honored for his efforts.

Delouis, an associate at McCarter & English law firm, has been named a recipient of the National Law Journal’s 2010 Pro Bono Awards.  Delouis and firm partner R. Andrew Richards are developing a microfinance initiative that will enable predominantly low-income Haitian farmers to obtain loans, with the goal of stimulating economic development in the earthquake-ravaged country . . .

[His] work in Haiti will facilitate small loans to farmers in this country where there are few lending sources for the underprivileged. The loans are expected to help farmers increase their yield and transform their commodity crops – including mangos, coffee and cocoa – to higher value end products. The program will provide seed money to the working poor in Haiti and help them build and stabilize their farming and business ventures.

For Delouis, the mission is also a personal one. “As the son of Haitian immigrants who lost close relatives in the earthquake, it was very important for me to give back to a country and a people so close to my heart. We are confident that the project will have a long-term impact, especially given the growing emphasis on decentralization in Haiti,” he said.

Delouis and Richards were recruited for the case by the International Senior Lawyers Project (ISLP), a New York-based group which provides pro bono assistance to governments and non-profit organizations in the developing world . . .

Delouis was also recognized by ISLP in October for the assistance he provided to public defenders in the Haitian provinces, which lacked access to such basic legal resources as their constitution and criminal codes. Currently, Delouis is working with Lutheran Social Services of New York to help Haitian immigrants who arrived after the earthquake apply for deferred action status, which allows applicants to remain in the United States for a temporary authorized period of time.

We hope you enjoyed reading this good news as well!  Congrats Ralph for earning a well-deserved recognition for your hard work this year!

Earlier this week, Vermont Law School released the Top 10 Environmental Watch List for 2011 highlighting the “nation’s most critical environmental law and policy issues of 2010 and how they may play out in 2011.”

Which issues made the top three on their list?

1. Congressional failure to enact climate change legislation: Professor Gus Speth, a pioneer of the environmental movement, explores what went wrong and whether the EPA and state and local lawmakers will step forward in 2011.

2. The nation’s worst oil spill: Associate Professor Betsy Baker, an expert in the law of the sea, examines the legal and policy fallout from the Deepwater Horizon disaster.

3. First U.S. greenhouse gas rules: Professor Pat Parenteau, whose expertise includes climate change, looks at whether the EPA’s efforts to restrict global warming pollutants will survive judicial and political challenges.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rycqUaKRolE&rel=0&hl=en_US&feature=player_embedded&version=3]

The full report examines 10 judicial, regulatory, legislative and other actions that have significant impacts on humans and the environment.  Read the full report here.

A big thank you from the PSLawNet Blog to Vermont Law School for their dedication to improving the public’s understanding of environmental law and policy issues!

This week: indigent defense budget wrangling between a county and state government; a new veterans clinic will operate out of a West Virginia Veterans Affairs building; Ithaca has gorges and a securities law clinic; it’s nice when a legal services lawyer is the GREATEST PERSON OF THE DAY; a 30-year prison ordeal ended for an innocent man following his exoneration in a Texas court (wow, if the PSLawNet Blog subtracted 30 years from his life he’d be writing this report in crayon and commuting to work on a Big Wheel); hail to the new LSC chief; a  new Top Ten Environmental Watch List from Vermont Law School; the “perfect storm” in legal services funding; the National Law Journal’s Pro Bono Awards; in California, you best not call yourself “legal aid” unless you’re really legal aid; mirroring a national trend, law-firm pro bono in Kansas City picked up during the recession; no honeymoon period for Texas’s new death-row appeals office; the remarkable story of a recovering drug addict who’s just become a California county’s chief prosecutor.

• 1.6.10 – according to the Poughkeepsie Journal, in a cost-saving move last year New York’s state government passed a bill that changed the nature of its relationship with Dutchess County for purposes of funding indigent defense services.  County officials are contending with a potential loss of revenue from the state unless the county moves away from an assigned-counsel system and toward a staffed public defense program.  This situation is but one illustration of the tension that will exist between state and county governments as they struggle with post-recession budget shortfalls.  Criminal justice is an area in which many state and municipal governments throughout the country have shared-cost arrangements, so it will be interesting to see how they maintain balances amidst fiscal pressures in the coming budget cycles.

• 1.5.10 – In West Virginia, the State Journal reports on a new veterans legal clinic that will station a lawyer at the VA building.  “The Louis A. Johnson VA Medical Center has a new legal aid program for its veterans. Legal Aid of West Virginia, Equal Justice Works, AmeriCorps, The State Nursing Home, and the VA Hospital are all working together to offer free legal assistance to Veterans and their family members.”  Once per week, an Equal Justice Works/AmeriCorps Legal Fellow will set up shop in the VA to meet with those in need.

• 1.4.10 – from the Ithaca Journal, we learn of a recession-era legal clinic operating at Cornell: “The Securities Law Clinic at Cornell Law School is available to provide legal services to investors in the Southern Tier and central and western New York who have suffered losses due to fraud or other improper conduct, the clinic announced.”

• 1.4.10 – the Huffington Post’s “Greatest Person of the Day” on Tuesday was Anneliese Gryta, a legal services lawyer doing community economic development work in Toledo (go Mudhens!).  Anneliese’s doing some terrific work as an Equal Justice Works Fellow.  Check out our earlier blog post to learn more about her efforts.

• 1.4.10 – NPR was one of several news outlets that covered the release of an innocent Texan man after 30 years of incarceration.  The story focused on the release of Cornelius Dupree, Jr., and went on to note that there’s something of a trend afoot in Dallas.  “For the past five years, Dallas has watched a parade of men, nearly all black, march out of the state prison system after wasting decades of their lives. Dupree, who served more time than any other Texas prisoner exonerated by DNA evidence, is the 21st from Dallas — that’s more than all but two states.  Barry Scheck and his staff at the Innocence Project have been behind many of these exonerations, including Dupree’s.”  It’s not necessarily that Dallas County juries get it wrong more than others, but Dallas happens to do a good job of storing DNA from old criminal cases.  So advocates for the wrongfully imprisoned have more evidence to work with.

Keep reading . . .

Last June, our former NALP colleague Katie Dilks published an article asking “Why is Nobody Talking about Gender Diversity in Public Interest Law?”  Katie noted that while a lot of time and effort is used analyzing gender gaps which disfavor female attorneys in law-firm practice and on the bench, there’s been little discussion of the fact that the tables are turned in the nonprofit arena:

[According to NALP’s 2004 After the J.D. report,] 9% (147) of the women surveyed worked in civil legal services or public defender offices, nonprofits or education, and public interest, while only 4% (71) of the men worked in these fields.

Nonprofit guys and gals, but mostly gals

More recent research by the National Legal Aid & Defender Association supports the idea of a notable gender gap in the civil legal services community, particularly among younger attorneys.  The survey effort that led to NLADA’s 2007 report, It’s the Salaries, Stupid…And Much More, was focused mainly on gathering information from legal services attorneys 35 and younger about how salary and debt impacted their decision to remain in legal services or move to private practice.  A startling data point emerged when the responses were broken down by gender: of the 786 survey respondents, 79% were female.  4 in 5. Wow. 

We’ve now got some even fresher data which confirms a gender gap within nonprofit law offices.  NALP’s 2010 Public Interest & Public Sector Attorney Salary Survey (final report available in NALP’s bookstore here), in addition to collecting salary data, also collected data about the gender makeup in public interest law offices.  Among attorneys in civil legal services offices, 66% were female.  (That 2 in 3 legal services attorneys are female might seem like good news in light of the 4-in-5 figure from the 2007 NLADA report.  But recall that the NLADA data dealt only with attorneys 35 years old and younger.  So it’s reasonable to at least wonder if the gender gap could be wider among younger attorneys.)

Interestingly, by comparison, attorneys working with local prosecutors’ and public defenders’ offices were split nearly 50/50 with respect to gender makeup.

There has long been discussion in the legal services community about the “why” – why is the community disproportionately female?  One worrisome explanation which has been offered is that the low salaries (legal services salaries are basically at the back of the pack in the legal industry) ward off men, particularly those who feel a need to be significant breadwinners on the domestic front.  In this circumstance, there is a tie-in between the gender makeup of an office and the salaries paid to attorneys.  John Tobin, executive director of New Hampshire Legal Assistance, wrote in a 2003 Management Information Exchange Journal article:

“Legal services salaries are so low that many legal services staff are de facto subsidized by a spouse/partner, and a divorce/breakup can make the legal services person’s financial situation untenable. Legal services staffs are becoming disproportionately female. We must ask ourselves what role we are unwittingly playing in a culture that conditions women to work for less.”

Yesterday the commy-pinko liberal website The Huffington Post bestowed it’s “Today’s Greatest Person” honor on a truly deserving advocate: Anneliese Gryta, an Equal Justice Works Fellow working at Advocates for Basic Legal Equality (ABLE) in Toledo, Ohio.  Most folks, when they think of “civil legal services,” think of lawyers helping low-income clients who are facing homelessness, domestic abuse, medical problems, and the like.  But a more recent innovation in delivering legal services to low-income communities involves a focus on community economic development issues – aiding small businesses and nonprofit organizations which are the commercial backbones (and keys to revitalization) in low-income neighborhoods.  This is where Annaliese has made herself an expert in the Great State of Ohio.

    After graduating from law school in 2008, Anneliese immediately set out to help. With the Equal Justice Works AmeriCorps Legal Fellowship, she began her work helping small businesses with legal aid and clinics. For those untrained in the legal intricacies of starting a business, help from seasoned attorneys can be invaluable.

…

In her second fellowship with Equal Justice Works, Anneliese is aiming even higher–helping businesses acquire the loans they need to get off the ground, with a focus on the economically disadvantaged.

“In this economy, in a place like Toledo with such a high unemployment rate you may have to create your own job,” she said. “I wanted to do something that treated the cause of poverty–lack of resources, lack of finances, lack of credit, lack of education in how to handle money.”

Her newest project involves founding two microloans funds for Toledo-based businesses. Assets Toledo helps with very small loans up to $5,000 for graduates of the business training program they also run, with a special focus on those with little credit history.

This is terrific, and inspiring, news.  Annaliese has made use of Equal Justice Works’s AmeriCorps Legal Fellows program and it’s traditional fellowship program to build expertise in economic development issues affecting Ohio communities.  Well done. 

BONUS!  Appropo of nothing else than the fact that this story involves Ohio, we present you with our favorite song about the Buckeye State: Damien Jurado’s Ohio.

One year and 350 posts later, we’re positively thrilled that the PSLawNet Blog has transitioned from an uncertain experiment to a going concern!  The Blog was viewed almost 50,000 times last year, and more importantly our readership grew consistently from the beginning of 2010 to the end.  We’ll use this birthday post to do two things: 1) thank our contributors and colleagues, and 2) lay out our goals for the blog in 2011.

First, we must thank the extraordinarily talented and accomplished guest bloggers who have contributed to our “Expert Opinion” series.  Our guests have included some true luminaries in the public interest arena (e.g. Orleans Parish Public Defender Derwyn Bunton), up-and-coming public interest stars (Todd Belcore, now an Equal Justice Works Fellow in Chicago), as well as law school administrators (like Georgetown Law’s public service dean Barbara Moulton and Temple Law School’s dean JoAnne Epps) who have public interest backgrounds and now promote those careers for students.  We also owe a huge debt of gratitude to former PSLawNet Fellow Katie Dilks, the founding co-editor of the Blog, and to all of the other public interest bloggers (see our Blogroll at right) who work diligently to keep our community informed and connected.

Second, we want to highlight some of the content you’ll be seeing in 2011.  The PSLawNet Blog covers two separate but overlapping content areas: general news coming from the public interest community, as well as resources for finding and landing public interest jobs.  To those ends, here’s what will appear regularly on the Blog: 

• The PSLawNet Jobs Report will run every Monday.  The Report – like this one posted yesterday – will offer updates on the number of new listings posted on PSLawNet, feature one or two really attractive listings among the new ones, and highlight one of the dozens of career resources which are freely available on PSLawNet.
• The PSLawNet Public Interest News Bulletin will run every Friday.  The Bulletin – like this one posted last week – summarizes public interest news stories from legal and non-legal media throughout the country.  (Why is keeping up with this news important for law students and recent grads?  It will help you immensely when networking and interviewing for jobs.  A job candidate who’s aware of recent developments in a certain field and who has a contextual knowledge of how that field works and who the primary actors are will be memorable to interviewers.)
• Our Expert Opinion series isn’t missing a beat.  Look out for a blog post on job-search strategic planning this week, and a post on networking tips next week.
• In addition to these three running features, we’re going to ramp up our posting of news stories, event announcements, and job resources during the week so that the blog has even more consistent, robust content offerings.

Thanks for reading, and please let us know if there’s anything you’d like to see on the PSLawNet Blog.  Happy 2011!

– Steve Grumm and Meredith Flowe

The National Law Journal just ran a well reported but very sobering (at best) piece about the funding woes confronting civil legal services programs throughout the nation.  This passage aptly sums up the circumstances:

Law firms may be benefiting from the slow economic recovery, but legal aid groups face the most dire circumstances in decades. The problem is a perfect storm of IOLTA funding declines, cuts in state and local funding, uncertain federal support and a tight private fundraising environment. The situation is exacerbated by steep increases in demand for free legal services as millions of low-income Americans face long-term unemployment, foreclosure and other serious problems.

The article offers a detailed, data-driven review of the funding cuts plaguing the nation’s legal services programs, and is well worth reading.  Very troubling for us are the numbers concerning staff constrictions and layoffs: 

• Texas RioGrande Legal Aid “stopped filling open lawyer positions in 2010 to prepare for cuts and may close offices, institute layoffs and roll back its caseload in 2011…”
• The Legal Aid Society in NYC “eliminated 30 staff positions in its civil division” and “can help only one of every nine people who ask for assistance.”
• Legal Services of New Jersey, an umbrella for Garden State legal services programs, was forced to “eliminate about 200 of its 700 positions since 2007, and President Melville Miller Jr. anticipates cutting another 50 to 70 jobs in 2011 if more money can’t be found.”
• New Mexico Legal Aid’s “employees agreed to a six-day furlough in 2010 to save money, but it may need to close one office and lay off four or five workers in 2012.” 

This is in keeping with what we’ve heard from other legal services executive directors, who have been struggling to make budgetary ends meet without cutting staff.  This situation is distressing for at least two reasons.  First, we know that many law students and recent grads have invested time, effort, and money in preparation for serving clients on society’s margins.  And while so many would-be advocates around the country want nothing more than the opportunity to serve as legal services lawyers, the opportunities to do so are increasingly few and far between.  Second, and more importantly, fewer lawyers means fewer clients served.  As noted in the NLJ piece, demand for services from the swollen numbers of low-income clients has skyrocketed in the recession’s wake.  It’s alarming, and positively disheartening, that the legal services community has been so hobbled by funding cuts at a time when it is needed to protect and assert the rights of so many vulnerable people and families.

From an email circulated today: 

James J. Sandman, a former longtime Managing Partner at the law firm of Arnold & Porter LLP and the current General Counsel and Chief Legal Officer for the District of Columbia Public Schools, has been selected as the next President of the Legal Services Corporation, Board Chairman John G. Levi announced today.

Here’s the full announcement from the LSC website.  The PSLawNet Blog has had the good fortune to work with folks at Arnold & Porter, Mr. Sandman’s old firm, on a number of pro bono/public interest-related  projects.  From this, we know that Mr. Sandman’s reputation as an advocate for public interest law and for promoting access to justice could not be stronger.

And here’s a little more coverage from the Blog of the Legal Times.

Some folks think it’s nearly impossible for a public defender to transition to prosecuting crimes, or vice versa.  For some attorneys, that may be the case, due to ideological or other motivations.  But many attorneys do bounce between public defense and prosecution jobs. 

Here, from the California-based Daily Triplicate (great newspaper name!) is the particularly compelling story of Jon Alexander, who’s being sworn in as Del Norte County’s top prosecutor today.  He just left his job as a public defender to become the boss on the other side of the courtroom.

Criticisms of Alexander for being a public defender pursuing a prosecutor’s position frustrated him, he said.

“It bothered me that certain people decried it,” said Alexander. “It was an honor to be a defense attorney and represent the county’s indigent.”

He referenced John Adams defending British soldiers and then going to war against them later because he believed in the right of being innocent until proven guilty.

“If you take that oath and adhere to it, then justice gets served no matter what side you’re on,” said Alexander.

It could be Alexander’s past personal experiences that allow him to move comfortably between the two positions.  He’s a recovering drug addict, and it was the intervention of a judge several years ago which allowed him to turn his life around.  Now, Alexander’s promising to be tough as nails on dealers, but says that users who wish to change their lives for the better will be given opportunities.  We suppose that Alexander knows exactly how much a person can make of an opportunity like that.