Sam Halpert, NALP Director of Public Service Initiatives

Hello there, interested public! It’s been an eventful week. Many folks have worked to make sense of the many changes wrought last week in Congress’ omnibus bill. A judge in Georgia explained how important law schools are to the access-to-justice ecosystem while mourning the loss of Savannah Law School. And, of course, a tidbit I’ve created a special highlight for immediately below.

Until next week,
Sam

Highlight: Character & Fitness

• The Practice published a conversation exploring potential reforms to the way our profession attempts to ensure ethical conduct through its character & fitness requirements. As with intimated changes to federal hiring & firing (see below), these kinds of ideas would have a profound effect on who attempts to become a lawyer and how attorneys’ work is reviewed. Here’s a representative snippet:
  

  “The more I study this, the more the whole process feels arbitrary, often because the people who make the decisions at the bar associations are people who don’t have experience with the criminal justice system. They don’t understand things like reentry, rehabilitation, and all of the collateral consequences of coming out of prison. And they don’t understand addiction issues either.
  …
  [I]f the goal of character and fitness is to weed out lawyers without integrity, it is not working…[A]s a profession, I think that we should spend a lot less time worrying about character and fitness at entry and more time and more resources monitoring the conduct and behavior of practicing lawyers. I realize that it’s much easier to just keep people out at the front end and not have to deal with issues once somebody becomes a lawyer, but that system is not working.”

Federal Hiring

• The Hill published an opinion piece that picks up where this year’s State of the Union Address left off, arguing “Civil servants can undermine the president too easily.” I’ll be watching the development of arguments like this one, because if these voices are successful they may transform the way professional development happens in federal government.
• On a possibly related note, “[t]op law schools in the nation’s capital say they are seeking an uptick in students’ interest in careers outside of government and public interest.”
• The Treasury Department and the IRS proposed a regulation that would allow the IRS to hire outside specialists under certain circumstances, with a specific prohibition against doing so in situations involving summoned information or testimony under oath.

Student Loans

• Financial Regulation News discussed the Public Service Loan Forgiveness Technical Corrections Act, signed into law as part of last week’s omnibus spending bill. The bill aims to ensure that borrowers who should have been enrolled in the PSLF program but were not will be able to receive benefits. The New York Times provided additional background on the change.
• In Massachusetts, state officials spoke out against the Trump administration’s recent declaration that states cannot regulate student loan services. (Chronicled in a recent edition of the digest.)
• A group of Harvard Law students and alumni published an open letter to Havard Law’s Dean proposing five changes to the school’s Low Income Protection Plan “in order to ’empower HLS graduates of all backgrounds to pursue the careers of their choosing.'”

Immigration

• In New Jersey, Governor Murphy’s proposed budget includes a $2.1 million appropriation for immigrants facing deportation.
• In Iowa, “Catholic Charities of the Archdiocese of Dubuque is expanding its immigration legal services as the need for those resources continues to increase.”
• In Ohio, the Ohio Legal Assistance Foundation argued that “Ohio’s philanthropic community must fully commit to investing in language, legal and health-care services to launch our newest Ohioans to success…Fewer than 35 attorneys statewide are available to assist Ohio’s immigrants regardless of their legal status or ability to pay.”

Legal Technology

• In Canada, the Law News Times reported that the Federal Privacy Commissioner “is working on developing new guidance on how companies should ask Canadians for meaningful consent [to collect, use, and disclose their personal information].”
• In Montreal, QC, Pro Bono Quebec launched the new version of its boussolejuridique.ca platform: http://boussolejuridique.ca/
• The Atlantic proposed questions for Congress to ask Mark Zuckerberg, solicited from a variety of scholars–including law professors. (Editor’s note: In addition to its effect on modern politics, Facebook’s technology platform provides the foundation for certain legal services tools, making issues surrounding privacy and Facebook relevant to our legal technology discussion. See, e.g. DoNotPay.)

Access to Justice – Civil

• In Canada, CBC reported that “a growing number of Canadians are representing themselves in court.”
• In a statement, the ABA President commended Congress for increasing appropriations for the LSC by $25 million, while noting that more funding is still needed.
• In Indiana, Indiana Legal Services also welcomed the news of the expanded LSC budget.
• Nonprofit Quarterly analyzed the ways in which the recent two-year budget agreement, which provided an “unexpected funding boost” for nonprofits, will affect the operations of civil society organizations.
• In Kentucky, the state senate voted to eliminate funding for civil legal aid. Negotiations are ongoing. If senators are successful, Kentucky will become the third state without civil legal aid funding (alongside Delaware and Idaho).

Access to Justice – Criminal

• The 6th Circuit issued its en banc opinion in Turner v. U.S., finding no 6th amendment right to counsel prior to criminal indictment. The Volokh Conspiracy analyzed the ruling.
• In Savannah, GA, the Chief Judge for Chatham County State Court mourned the loss of Savannah Law School:
  

  “Over the last seven years, students have given 1000s of hours of unpaid labor to our courts, the Public Defenders office, the District Attorneys’ Office, the U.S. Attorney’s Office, the Federal Courthouse and in other practices across the low country. If you calculated those hours in terms of salaries (conservatively for a $12 per hour wage), it is safe to say the Law School as provided more than $1,000,000 worth of labor to the local community.”

• In Philadelphia, PA, the Chief Public Defender “is accusing the city’s court system of systematically depriving thousands of people of their due process rights by locking them up for probation violations without proper hearings.”
• In Galveston, TX, a lawyer brought suit against a local judge alleging the judge improperly removed him from cases because “he sought to provide a vigorous legal and factual defense for his clients.” As the New York Times puts it, the case aims to call attention to “[a] potential problem: Indigent defense lawyers often get their assignments from judges in whose courtroom they appear. This discourages a robust defense, experts say, and leads to an emphasis on resolving cases quickly.”
• In El Paso County, TX, the Texas Indigent Defense Commission released a report commending county officials for their successful efforts to address a series of problems discovered by the commission’s 2014 audit.
• In Michigan, the Marquette County Board of Commissioners unanimously opposed Governor Snyder’s proposed adjustments to Michigan’s indigent defense budget for fiscal year 2019, “stating it would unfairly shift financial burdens from the state onto counties.”

Music Bonus!

Janelle Monae, “Django Jane” [clean]

Sam Halpert, NALP Director of Public Service Initiatives

Hello there, interested public! The big news this week is out of the Philadelphia DA’s office; if you haven’t read Larry Krasner’s memo yet, it’s well worth a look. On a related theme, “The Nation” magazine discusses ways in which law schools are attempting to step into the legal aid gap in the face of federal indifference. (There’s a lot of access to justice news this week, but those are the two standout bits.)

Until next week,
Sam

Student Loans

• In Congress, the $1.3 trillion, six-month spending plan expanded Pell Grants and Public Service Loan Forgiveness funds.
• Meanwhile, the Project on Predatory Student Lending at Harvard University filed a motion for an injunction seeking to prevent the US Department of Education from using earnings data to grant only partial student loan forgiveness to defrauded borrowers.

Access to Justice – Civil

• “The Nation” Magazine takes stock of the current environment in which indigent legal services –criminal and civil– are being provided, and the ways in which law schools are attempting to fill the gaps created by the retreat of the federal government.
• In Canada, lawyers were critical of the federal justice minister’s response to recommendations by a Commons committee on how to improve legal aid.
• In Massachusetts, legal aid organizations are calling on the state to increase its budget for civil legal aid by $5 million.
• In Alberta, legal aid workers voted to strike if their demands are not met, in response to staff reductions, office closures, and increased demand for services.

Access to Justice – Criminal

• In Newfoundland, the provincial government amended the Legal Aid Act to remove recipients’ option to retain private defense lawyers for serious criminal charges.
• In South Carolina, two state legislators proposed a bill that would mandate and centralize indigency screenings for potential public defender clients.
• In Mississippi, the Mississippi Public Defender Task Force released a report finding that (as the Jackson Free Press put it) “access to adequate representation across 10 Mississippi counties is lacking and far from consistent.” The full report is available at the Mississippi Judiciary’s website.
• In Maryland, the Office of the Public Defender released a study concluding that (as the Frederick News Post put it) “Maryland judges need more alternatives to pretrial detention, even as courts have successfully reduced their reliance on cash bail.”
• In Pennsylvania, a federal judge ruled that students facing criminal charges have to right to an attorney during related disciplinary hearings at their school.
• In St. Louis County, MO, a judge ruled that the public defender’s office has too many cases to effectively represent its clients.

Criminal Justice Reform

• In Philadelphia, PA, newly-elected DA Larry Krasner’s intra-office memo of February 15th became public. The memo details a variety of sweeping changes to the way the Philadelphia district attorney’s office will conduct its business, with the stated aim of “end[ing] mass incarceration and bring[ing] balance back to sentencing.”
• In New York, in an open letter in New York Magazine’s “The Cut”, the “Time’s Up” movement called on Gov. Cuomo to investigate the New York County district attorney’s office for its decision not to prosecute Harvey Weinstein for sexual abuse crimes against one of his accusers.

Music Bonus!

Marvin Gaye, “Inner City Blues”

Sam Halpert, NALP Director of Public Service Initiatives

Hello there, interested public! Student loans made for the most noteworthy news again this week, as the Department of Education weighed in on state government’s recent efforts to regulate lending. The LSC also announced a new disaster legal aid initiative. For these stories and more, read on!

Until next week,
Sam

Student Loans

• The Federal Department of Education issued guidance warning state regulators that “[s]tate regulation of the servicing of direct loans impedes uniquely federal interests.”  Experts consulted in the Washington Post article linked here believe that “[m]any states are likely to view this document as legally dubious.”
• The National Review published a piece endorsing the idea of offering student loan relief to borrowers who forgo collecting Social Security, lending support to the student loan solution proposed earlier this year by Rep. Tom Garrett (R-VA).
• Responding to claims that student debt is ruining borrowers’ lives, Ameritech Financial warned against “us[ing] blanket statements…when student deb situations vary so much from borrower to borrower.”

Immigration

• In New York, NY, New York Lawyers for the Public Interest relaunched a hotline that people can call to determine if they are eligible for naturalization and register for immigration clinics.
• In San Francisco, CA, Sheriff Vicki Hennessy apologized for her office, while allowed two US ICE agents access to interview rooms at San Francisco County jails–a breach of the city’s Sanctuary City policy.

Legal Technology

• In Florida, Southern Legal Counsel and the Florida Justice Technology Center partnered to create FloridaNameChange.org, a tool to assist transgender Floridians with updating government-issued documents to reflect their new names and gender markers. (You’ll be able to hear about the Florida Justice Technology Center’s work at NALP’s Annual Education Conference, where their Executive Director will be speaking at the Public Interest Lunch on Thursday, April 26th.)
• In New York, NY, TechCrunch.com profiled JustFix.nyc — a smartphone-based service that helps tenants document issues, draft letters of complaint, and file cases in NYC Housing Court.

Disaster Legal Aid

• At a Congressional briefing, “[t]wo state chief justices and legal aid experts from states recently affected by natural disasters [discussed] how legal aid programs funded by the Legal Services Corporation (LSC) assist survivors.” LSC’s Board Chair also announced a new taskforce “to improve legal aid disaster relief coordination and effectiveness across the country.”
• In Florida, the Puerto Rican Bar Association of Florida “opened a nonprofit legal clinic focused on providing legal services to Puerto Ricans who have settled in Florida after fleeing Hurricane Maria.” The clinic itself employs displaced Puerto Rican attorneys.

Criminal Justice Reform

• Professor Besiki Luka Kutateladze of Florida International University embarked on a two-year study of prosecutors’ offices in Jacksonville, Tampa, Milwaukee and Chicago. Professor Kutateladze’s team plans to “comb individual case files and implement new data-tracking tools that will detect racial bias, explain how plea deals work and see if policies are increasing the community’s trust in the justice system.”
• In Yolo County, CA, the District Attorney and the Public Defender announced a collaborative effort to expedite relief to individuals with marijuana convictions affected by California’s recent ballot measure legalizing the drug.
• In Montana, the state appointed a new Director of the Office of the State Public Defender, tasked with “continuing implementation of a package of bills passed during the 2017 legislative session to reform the Office[.]”
• In Glynn County, GA, the ACLU filed a lawsuit accusing country officials of “an unconstitutional cash bail system that discriminates against people who are financially strapped.”
• In Ottawa, Ontario, Yahoo News! examined the impact of the city’s indigenous people’s court six months into its operation.

Music Bonus!

Thundercat @ NPR Music’s Tiny Desk Concert Series (10/25/17)

Sam Halpert, NALP Director of Public Service Initiatives

Hello there, interested public! The digest is a bit abbreviated this week, as I write to you from NALP’s Newer Professionals Forum. I look forward to putting what I’m learning here to work for all of you in the weeks and months ahead. (And if you’re at the conference, feel free to come find me!)

The big news this week involves a student loan tidbit you won’t want to miss! (Read below.)

Until next week,
Sam

Student Loans

• InsideHigherEd.com reported that “[t]he Department of Education signaled…that it is interested in tweaking the standards used for determining whether student loan debt can be discharged in bankruptcy.“

Access to Justice – Civil

• In San Francisco, CA, the interim Mayor unexpectedly announced his support for a legal fund that would create a right to counsel for deportation cases in the city.

Access to Justice – Criminal

• In Minnehaha County, SD, the public defender’s office warned that an increased focus in the county on drug arrests has created a staffing crisis that threatens its ability to represent defendants in homicide cases.

Law School News

• Kaplan reported that a survey revealed that over 30% of pre-law students were motivated to pursue law by the results of the 2016 election.
• UPenn Law received a $3 million dollar donation from Robert and Jane Toll, which it will put toward public interest scholarships and loan repayment assistance. [Full article behind paywall.]

Music Bonus!

C2C, “Happy” (feat. Derek Martin)

Sam Halpert, NALP Director of Public Service Initiatives

Hello there, interested public! The big news this week includes big decisions from the Attorney General of California and the Philadelphia DA’s office, as well as a report publishing the results of a worldwide survey on access to justice.

And speaking of surveys…

• NALP is still collecting responses for the 2018 Public Service Attorney Salary Survey.  We’ve extended our deadline through Friday, March 2nd to collect as many responses as we can. 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 Midwest. (If you’re curious, here are some more details about this study, from the last time we published this report.)

Until next week,
Sam

Disaster Legal Aid

• The Miami Herald reported on the ongoing misery of low-income Floridians caught beneath the fury of Hurricane Irma and beyond the reach of legal services.

Student Loans

• AboveTheLaw.com discussed the social implications of lawyers publicly discussing their loan forgiveness status–and speculated as to the potential policy consequences of such behavior.

Pro Bono Services

• In Maryland, the Administrative Office of the Courts submitted its report on the “Current Status of Pro Bono Service Among Maryland Lawyers (2016)”: “Approximately 53 percent of the lawyers practicing full-time in the state helped people of limited means…Maryland boasts one of the highest rates of pro bono activity in the country.“

Access to Justice – Civil

• The World Justice Project published “Global Insights on Access to Justice,” research which “presents data on how ordinary people around the world navigate their everyday legal problems.” The data for the United States is summarized on page 53: 48% of survey respondents experienced a legal problem within the last two years, and only 23% of those turned to an authority or third party to help resolve the problem.
•  In Idaho, the former State Supreme Court Chief Justice (ret. 2017) advocated for state-level funding for Idaho Legal Aid in the Idaho Press-Tribune.
• In New York, New York Law School’s Center for New York City Law published a thorough overview of NYC’s new right to counsel law for low-income tenants facing eviction.
• In Maryland, the editorial board of the Daily Record advocated for the right to counsel in housing cases for Baltimore residents. [NB: The full article is behind a paywall.]

Access to Justice – Criminal

• In Texas County, Missouri, the Missouri State Public Defender entirely privatized its services; state lawmakers are engaged in ongoing debate over  whether to privatize the state’s public defender system in response to challenges of unconstitutional failures to provide adequate representation.

Criminal Justice Reform

• In Philadelphia, PA, the city’s new district attorney announced that his office has dropped all criminal marijuana possession charges that aren’t coupled with intent to deliver or sell, and that this will be the office’s new policy going forward.
• In California, the State Attorney General declined to appeal a ruling finding that a defendant’s ability to pay must be taken into account when setting bail, “adding his voice to the growing statewide push to overhaul a money bail system that criminal justice advocates argue is discriminatory to poor Californians.“
• In British Columbia, the Women’s Legal Education & Action Fund (West Coast LEAF) criticized the province’s new budget for failing to adequately fund legal aid.

Music Bonus!

Kendrick Lamar & SZA, “All The Stars”

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:
  

  “It’s not that they don’t want to come work for us, it’s that they can’t afford to…[A]s creative as I can be sometimes, I cannot kidnap people with law degrees and put them in courtrooms. I can’t hire. I’ve had vacancies open for six months–a year in many jurisdictions.“

• 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.

Music Bonus!

Fever the Ghost, “((SOURCE))”

Sam Halpert, NALP Director of Public Service Initiatives

Hello there, interested public! There are a few major stories this week, spread out across topics. Look for big changes to federal hiring on the horizon and important new research affecting the Immigration debate and the Student Loan debate. Before we get to that, though, I have another appeal to make:

• NALP has launched 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 that our eventual report (to be released later this year) is as useful as possible, I hope that everyone will help me by sharing the survey link (www.psjd.org/salarysurvey) with their networks and encouraging as many organizations as possible to contribute to this study. We are already hearing back from participating organizations eager to learn the results, so hopefully you would be doing your contacts a favor to pass this along. (Here are some more details about this study, from the last time we published this report.)

Until next week,
Sam

Federal Hiring

• OMB officials speaking anonymously revealed to reporters that the Trump Administration’s budget will include “the most ambitious proposal to overhaul the civil service in 40 years.“

DACA/Immigration

• The Texas Civil Rights project released a report providing the first detailed look at the effect of deportation policies on veterans. The report is titled “Land of the Free, No Home to the Brave: A Report on the Social, Economic, and Moral Cost of Deporting Veterans.“
• Public defenders held an impromptu protest after ICE agents detained an undocumented immigrant outside Bronx Criminal Court.

Disaster Legal Aid

• Pepperdine School of Law created a Disaster Relief Clinic to assist individuals affected by wildfires in California and hurricanes in Texas.

Legal Technology

• In Syracuse, NY, New York State has re-designated Syracuse University’s College of Law as a New York State Science and Technology Law Center.

Student Loans

• The CEO of the Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia gave a speech on higher education in which he called student loan debt a “real threat” to American households.
• The Levy Institute of Bard college released a paper suggesting that universal student debt amnesty is the best way to tackle the student debt crisis.
• The Department of Education’s Office of the Inspector General released a report on the costs of income-driven repayment plans and loan forgiveness programs. Journalism covering the report stated that “participation in income-driven repayment and loan forgiveness programs have grown in recent years, and the government is expected to lend more money than borrowers repay.” Apparently, this trend may have knock-on implications for for viability of the Affordable Care Act.
• Meanwhile, fewer than 1,000 of the 7,500 people who have applied for Public Service Loan forgiveness thus far are expected to qualify.

Access to Education

• In New York, state legislators have proposed a bill to reverse a “Ban the Box” initiative enacted in 2016 by the State University of New York Board of Trustees. The bill “would require SUNY schools to include ‘a question on whether the applicant has been convicted of any violent felony offense’ on their applications.“
• At Harvard Law, professors held a public debate over the law school’s alleged disconnect with public interest efforts. (A student-authored report, “Our Bicentennial Crisis,” sparked the debate last fall.)

Access to Justice – Criminal

• In New York, “Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo has proposed $50.7 million to counties across the state as part of a five-year plan to help pay the costs of indigent defense.“

Access to Justice – Civil

• In Cleveland, Ohio, the Cleveland Tenants Organization closed down after 40 years of efforts on behalf of tenants in the city. The organization served thousands from the city and its suburbs annually.
• Legal aid organizations have begun to feel the pain of cuts in funding from United Way after a budget shortfall at the funder last Spring. Last week, Prairie State Legal Services (Bloomington, IN) discussed the effect of cuts on their operations.

Music Bonus!

Sam Halpert, NALP Director of Public Service Initiatives

Hello there, interested public! The biggest story below is at the top of the civil A2J section, but there’s a different piece of news I want to call your particular attention to this week:

• NALP has launched 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 that our eventual report (to be released later this year) is as useful as possible, I hope that everyone will help me by sharing the survey link (www.psjd.org/salarysurvey) with their networks and encouraging as many organizations as possible to contribute to this study. We are already hearing back from participating organizations eager to learn the results, so hopefully you would be doing your contacts a favor to pass this along. (Here are some more details about this study, from the last time we published this report.)

Until next week,
Sam

Student Loans

• The National Center for Educational Statistics published a new dataset covering student borrowing patterns for 2015-2016.
• A veterinary news site detailed the effect of proposed changes to Public Service Loan Forgiveness on that profession.

Legal Technology

• AboveTheLaw published the second part of its examination of “How to Reboot the Justice System on Technology.”

Access to Justice – Civil

• The New York Times reported on the Justice Department’s quiet starvation of its Office for Access to Justice, an Obama-era initiative responsible for (among other things) launching the White House Legal Aid Interagency Roundtable and filing statements of interest in a variety of cases involving the criminalization of poverty.
• In Oklahoma, the State Supreme Court created a commission to investigate new models for providing indigent civil legal aid.
• The 9th Circuit held that “neither the Due Process Clause nor the Immigration & Nationality Act creates a categorical right to court-appointed counsel at government expense for alien minors.” The ACLU of Southern California called the ruling “a brutal decision.“
• In San Francisco, tenant advocacy groups assembled enough signatures to put a measure on the ballot proposing legal counsel for all renters in the city facing eviction.

Access to Justice – Criminal

• In Florida, the State’s Attorney’s Office has created Florida’s first conviction integrity review unit.
• In Wisconsin, a State Public Defender wrote an op-ed arguing that increasing pay for private attorneys who accept public defense cases is crucial to upholding Wisconsin’s Constitution.
• In Michigan, “many local governments have been asked to resubmit financial requests [related to new standards for indigent legal defense] that are being drafted and reviewed for the first time.“
• In Montana, “[s]tate budget cuts mean the Office of the State Public Defender is freezing salaries and reducing pay to contractors.“
• In Idaho, the ACLU won class action status for its lawsuit against the state’s allegedly defective public defense system.
• In New York City, the Legal Aid Society launched a prison book drive to furnish inmates with copies of “The New Jim Crow.”

Music Bonus!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sAxHALkWp_8

Sam Halpert, NALP Director of Public Service Initiatives

Hello there, interested public! Read on for two weeks worth of news, as I missed delivering the digest last week due to an illness. The most consequential story this week is out of Canada, where the Canadian Intern Association questioned the legality of the Canadian Civil Liberties Association’s internship program. Additional highlights include class action status for the ACLU’s indigent defense funding lawsuit in Idaho and a new report from Brookings with even more dire predictions about potential student loan default rates.

Until next week,
Sam

Disaster Legal Aid

• Legal experts anticipated a looming crisis in Puerto Rico as the majority of mortgage payment moratorium agreements issued after Hurricane Maria expire this month.

Student Loans

• The Brookings Institute, using newly-available data, issued a report predicting that in the near future the default rate on student loans may rise more sharply than previously anticipated, predicting “nearly 40 percent may default on their student loans by 2023.“
• Washington State’s Attorney General reintroduced a bill establishing a “student loan advocate” to “field complaints from loan borrowers, help them understand their loans and compile data on loans.“
• Prof. Jeffery Dorfman of the University of Georgia advocated in Forbes for Congress to adopt “automatic income-based payroll deduction programs for student loans” modeled on programs in Australia and Great Britain. The professor cites other experts to argue that this idea would “allow borrowers to cover basic living expenses first, remove an enormous amount of bureaucracy, and increase collections.”

Legal Technology

• The Legal Services Corporation held its “Innovations in Technology Conference” in New Orleans, LA. Interested readers can catch up on many of the conference presentations on the LSC’s Facebook feed.
• BYU Law’s legal design lab launched its first application: a tool designed to address Utah’s “debt collection epidemic.”

Access to Justice – Civil

• In Canada, the Canadian Intern Association warned the Canadian Civil Liberties Association that its summer internship program “likely” violates Ontario law.
• In Canada, the Supreme Court issued a decision expanding the scope of “public interest standing”–a development that may give advocacy groups increased access to administrative tribunals.
• In Ontario, Lakehead University’s student legal clinic expanded its services from the city of Thunder Bay into the surrounding district.
• In Ontario, the Law Society of Ontario’s board of directors voted unanimously to deepen its relationship with Legal Aid Ontario and to “champion the need for robust legal aid.“

• In Hawaii, the Legal Aid Society of Hawai’i will receive $300,000 from the Department of Housing and Urban Development to assist victims of housing discrimination.
• In Virginia, the Virginia Law Foundation launched a free online portal for attorneys providing poverty law training and resources to help them prepare to assist in pro bono cases.
• In New York City, CityLimits.org wrote a lengthy profile of early reactions to Mayor DeBlasio’s Right to Counsel initiative in housing cases.
• In Delaware, the Combined Campaign for Justice and the Delaware Community Foundation created a new legal aid fellowship in honor of recently-retired Delaware Supreme Court Justice Randy Holland. Holland Fellows will serve at one of Delaware’s three legal aid organizations for two years at a time.
• In St. Louis, Missouri, ArchCity Defenders announced a plan to expand its operations under a new Executive Director.
• In Kentucky, legal aid directors spoke out against the Governor of Kentucky’s proposal to eliminate all Access to Justice civil legal aid funding in the state’s 2018 budget.

Access to Justice – Criminal

• In Idaho, a court granted an ACLU lawsuit concerning public defender funding class action status.
• In Minnesota, Governor Mark Dayton recommended a public defender to fill a judicial opening in Minnesota’s 3rd Judicial District.
• In Yolo County, CA, a long-serving public defender announced his candidacy for District Attorney, “outlining a platform tackling overprosecution, racial inequity in the court’s and Yolo County’s high jury trial and incarceration rates.“
• In Wisconsin, private attorneys lobbied the state Supreme Court to increase the pay rate for indigent defense contract work; the current pay rate is the lowest in the country.
• In response to a report he commissioned from the Center for the Advancement of Public Integrity at Columbia Law School, Manhattan’s District Attorney announced “he will no longer accept campaign contributions from lawyers with business before his office, including those representing people being investigated or prosecuted.“
• In Wyoming, the state’s top public defender warned the state legislature that if it does not fund additional staff, “her attorneys are going to have to start refusing cases.“
• In New Mexico, the Albuquerque Journal interviewed a legendary public defender to create a history of indigent defense in Lincoln County tying growing caseloads and lengthening pre-trial detention to the fact that “legislators over the years have criminalized more and more behavior and added increased penalties to some crimes.” Meanwhile, Lincoln county’s District Attorney claims “public defenders in the region…are fabricating the crisis to get more funding.“

Music Bonus!

Sam Halpert, NALP Director of Public Service Initiatives

Hello there, interested public! A terse but consequential digest includes a significant development in student loans, as the Justice Department took steps to curb state efforts to protect loan forgiveness. The Chief Justice of Iowa also had remarkably strong words for the state legislature on the state of access to justice in his state.

Until next week,
Sam

Student Loans

• “The U.S. Justice Department has filed papers arguing Massachusetts’ attorney general cannot pursue claims under state law that one of the nation’s largest student loan servicers undermined a federal debt forgiveness program.“

Access to Justice – Civil

• A pilot clinic for pro bono legal advice on Prince Edward Island extended its services into 2018. This is the second such extension of the pilot.

Access to Justice – Criminal

• In his annual address to the Iowa General Assembly on the Condition of the Judiciary, the Chief Justice of the Iowa Supreme Court warned that declining funding for courts is “beginning to tear at the very fabric of our operation and mission…Iowans are losing access to justice.“
• The State Bar of Texas published a report in which “[c]urrent and former attorneys with the State Counsel for Offenders (SCFO), which represents indigent inmates accused of committing crimes inside Texas prisons, claim higher-ups at SCFO have ordered them to change legal strategy, for example prohibiting them from filing motions to assist mentally ill clients and even forcing them to withdraw from certain cases…after their bosses consulted with the Texas Board of Criminal Justice,…[which] controls SCFO’s purse strings and all other Texas Department of Criminal Justice [TDCJ] operations [including Texas prisons themselves].”
• In the opinion section of a local paper, Washington state legislator Derek Young announced his intention to focus on achieving full funding for criminal defense during the upcoming legislative session in Olympia, WA.
• A 2015 challenge to Indiana’s public defender system, alleging it violates the rights of indigent defendants to an adequate defense, is likely to proceed to the state Supreme Court after an appeals court last month upheld a decision below to dismiss the lawsuit.
•  After the state’s attorney’s office issued a bulletin suggesting hundreds of pedestrian tickets had been issued in error in recent years, local lawmakers in Jacksonville, FL called for police to stop issuing pedestrian tickets.

Music Bonus!

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