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.

The Alliance for Children’s Rights in protects the rights of impoverished and abused children and youth so that they have safe, stable homes, health care and the education they need to thrive.

Since its founding in 1992, The Alliance has provided free legal services and advocacy to over 100,000 children and youth in Los Angeles County. For many of its clients, The Alliance is the only connection to a safer, brighter future.

The Pro Bono Manager will work under the general supervision of the CEO and Legal Director and will generally be the liaison between ACR staff and volunteer attorneys, law students and other volunteers.

The Pro Bono Manager will be responsible for interfacing with local and national law firms and law school externship and career planning offices to engage pro bono and student services; placing cases with pro bono attorneys and maintain volunteer hours data bases; recruiting for and oversee all internships programs, including the Alliance’s summer programs, assisting in preparation of volunteer training materials and with substantive legal trainings, and other duties.

Interested? See the listing at PSLawNet!

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. 

The Center for Death Penalty Litigation (CDPL) is accepting applications for a staff attorney position. CDPL is a non-profit law firm located in Durham, NC that provides direct representation in capital cases and serves as a resource for attorneys throughout North Carolina who provide representation in capital cases.

The attorneys at CDPL provide direct representation to a significant number of death-sentenced inmates who are in post-conviction litigation. In addition, a number of staff attorneys represent indigent defendants facing a capital trial and also represent death-sentenced defendants on direct appeal.

CDPL currently has a staff of eight attorneys and two investigators. They are looking to hire one attorney to provide direct representation to indigent defendants facing a capital trial. In addition, the attorney would represent death-sentenced defendants in post-conviction proceedings.

Interested? See the listing at PSLawNet!

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.

Independent Police Monitor’s Legal Internship is designed to provide students with experience in legal research and writing and also with practical skills such as case assessment, analysis, interviewing and community organization. 

The primary duties of law school interns are to conduct research, analyze data, and prepare reports on policy issues related to police oversight and misconduct, as well as preventing and detecting fraud and abuse.

They will also conduct complaint intake after appropriate training.  Interns will review completed investigations of complaints of misconduct against NOPD police to determine whether the investigations performed by the NOPD Public Integrity Bureau comply with substantive and procedural due process standards.

Interested? Check out the listing at PSLawNet!

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

The Official Guide to Legal Specialties, a NALP publication, has some good information about the skills that are most important to public interest lawyers. What do you think of them?

Here are the obvious ones:

• Passion for public service
• Strong interpersonal communications skills
• Oral advocacy skills
• Organizational skills
• Time management skills

And the not-so-obvious ones:

• Patience
• Tenacity
• Foreign language skills
• Ability to cope with crises
• Resourcefulness

I would add flexibility to the list. Is there anything you would add?