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))”