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

Sam Halpert, NALP Director of Public Service Initiatives

Hello there, interested public! Welcome to 2018. In a roundup of stories from the end of last year, the main news items involve continued discussion of the student debt crisis (both in DC and within state governments) and the impact of recent policy changes at the Department of Justice on post-Ferguson federal reforms of court fines.

Until next week,
Sam

Student Loans

• Rep. Brian Fitzpatrick (R-PA) voiced his support for strengthening Public Service Loan Forgiveness, in opposition to proposals currently being discussed by other members of the House Republican Caucus.
• Washington State’s Attorney General called for legislation to give college borrowers greater safeguards against deceptive loan practices in a report on student indebtedness in his state.
• Democratic legislators in Wisconsin criticized a Republican proposal to provide student loan relief to attorneys who take public defender cases in sparsely-populated counties (mentioned in an earlier edition of this digest), arguing the strategy would create favor some areas of the state at the expense of others.
• The American Association of Law Schools’ new president expressed concern about proposals to eliminate Public Service Loan Forgiveness and cap graduate borrowing.

Access to Justice – Civil

• Idaho Legal Aid Services announced plans to hire a lobbyist to seek state funding in the face of a possible loss of federal support.
• The Baltimore, MD City District Court expanded its self-help aid for tenants in housing cases, as Maryland Legal Aid secured a $90,000 grant to expand its “Lawyer in the Library” program in Baltimore.
• Judge Workman of the West Virginia Supreme Court defended her institution’s access to justice record against recent criticism from a former Court administrative director, mentioning (among other measures) a new court rule directing half of all excess residual funds in class-action suits to Legal Aid.
• TVO.org discussed challenges francophones face exercising their rights to court proceedings in French in Ontario Province.

Access to Justice – Criminal

• Salon.com profiled Attorney General Sessions’ policies ending the practice of using nonbinding guidance to create policy at the Department of Justice–a procedural decision that has effected a reversal of federal positions created in the aftermath of the Ferguson protests to discourage local municipalities from financing government operations with court fines levied on poor defendants.
• The Lansing State Journal laid out the potential impact of Michigan’s attempts at indigent defense reform–with counties submitting plans which, if fully funded, would create an $87 million budget for public defense in the state, narrowing the gap between spending on prosecution and spending on defense from roughly $108 million to roughly $26 million.
• In Washington State, local reporting identified rising indigent defense costs as another consequence of the opioid epidemic.

Music Bonus!

Tiny Desk Concerts are often excellent.