BRIEFS

  

by Daniel Cox

 

 

Study: Legal Aid Only Proven 

Way to Curb Domestic Violence

 

A University of Arkansas study released by a pair of economists last August found that access to legal services is the only proven way to reduce incidences of domestic violence on a countywide basis. 


Co-author Amy Farmer, associate professor of economics at the University of Arkansas Sam M. Walton College of Business, and a colleague collected domestic violence data on every U.S. county and determined the type of social and governmental services available in each. She and Jill Tiefenthaler, an economics professor at Colgate University, compared the occurrences of domestic abuse in each county. After controlling for income and other variables, they found that legal aid was the only type of service that could be statistically linked to declining incidences of domestic abuse.


“By having access to an attorney, a woman might be able to get child support, she might be able to get alimony, she might be able to get a restraining order—which gives her a way out,” Farmer says. “These are real, tangible things that she can get by having a lawyer.


“We weren’t specifically looking at legal services in the study,” she adds. “But we found that no matter how we ran the data, no matter how we manipulated the statistics, it didn’t matter. Legal services were always important, and they were the only one.”


The study was a unique validation of the importance of legal services programs in helping abuse victims. Farmer says that economists have not traditionally studied domestic violence. “Just thinking about this issue from the perspective of economics as opposed to psychology or sociology was completely new,” she says.

 

 

Equal Justice Conference:

April 10-12 in Portland

 

 Advocates attending the fifth-annual national Equal Justice Conference will head out west this spring. The event, hosted by the American Bar Association (ABA) and the National Legal Aid & Defender Association, will be held April 10-12 in Portland, Ore. This year’s theme, “The Power of Partnerships,” will explore how communities can come together to expand access to the civil justice system. ABA President Alfred P. Carlton Jr., and Prof. David Hall of Northeastern University will keynote the event.



Coming Together in Iowa

After a combined 78 years of defending Iowa’s most vulnerable citizens, the state’s two federally funded legal aid programs came together to reopen under a single banner. On Jan. 1, 2003, Legal Aid Society of Polk County and Legal Services Corporation of Iowa joined forces to become Iowa Legal Aid. 


Dennis Groenenboom, executive director of the new organization, points to a $1-million budget shortfall as the catalyst for the merger. “Iowa Legal Aid will offer a leaner, more cost-effective approach to delivering services,” he says. 


The new statewide group is expected to handle approximately 20,000 cases this year and help as many as 50,000 low-income Iowans with pressing legal problems. Over the last five years, state funding for legal services in Iowa has been cut by almost 50 percent.

 

 

 

 

 



The Ballad of a Legal Aid Attorney
Legal services attorneys find many ways to escape the burdens of financial debt, long hours, endless clients, and looming budget cuts. Manuel Ramos, deputy director of Colorado Legal Services in Denver, writes award-winning novels. 


“In this office, we have musicians, people that raise Alpacas [a cousin to the llama], all sorts of things,” Ramos says.


Ramos’ first book, the “Ballad of Rocky Ruiz” (1993), earned critical acclaim even before it was published, receiving the Chicano/Latino Literary Award from the University of California at Irvine. Set in Denver, the story is a murder mystery about the unsolved slaying of a legal aid lawyer’s college friend, Rocky Ruiz, during their days in the Chicano activist movement. The novel captured the 1993 Colorado Book Award for best fiction and received a nomination for an Edgar Award, a national honor named for Edgar Allan Poe presented by the Mystery Writers of America.


Ramos’ work inhabits a unique niche in the literary market: the Chicano crime novel. While his best-selling work sold only 10,000 copies, his books have received high praise from literary critics. The accolades and the positive reviews do provide a certain validation, Ramos says, but in the end, they aren’t important. “I’m a writer. The creative process itself works to rejuvenate you.”


Like any good author, Ramos writes about what he knows. “My first story that got any sort of play was about a legal aid lawyer who was burned out,” he says. The short story, “White Devils and Cockroaches” (1986), was the first creative writing the advocate had done since he started law school more than 30 years ago. Ramos has since completed five novels.

 

 

AND THE AWARD GOES TO...

James Cameron
As L.A. galas go, the Legal Aid Foundation of Los Angeles’ (LAFLA) fourth-annual Access to Justice Dinner last November was a momentous affair, replete with celebrities, an awards ceremony, even a cabaret performance. Director James Cameron’s production company, Lightstorm Entertainment (the creative force behind Titanic and Terminator 2), was presented with LAFLA’s 2002 Access to Justice Award. Actor Bill Paxton (of “Weird Science” and “Titanic” fame) presented the award to Cameron (left) for his support of local legal aid efforts. In his acceptance speech, Cameron said, “It must not be, that in a nation committed to equal justice, that our most downtrodden are left to deal alone…with the lions of eviction and homelessness, domestic violence, arbitrary government-benefit loss,

slave-labor conditions, and the host of other legal problems that confront the poor.” More than 610 dinner guests helped raise a record $445,000 for equal justice.


Maria Luisa Mercado
Resources are scarce. The pay is substandard. And there are more clients than can possibly be helped. Yet legal aid attorneys, by and large, love what they do; they’re the last idealists of the legal profession. Every year since 1996, LSC-funded California Rural Legal Assistance has presented its prestigious Don Quixote Award to one advocate who has chased—and caught—a few windmills. Named after the crusading knight of Spanish literature, the annual award honors a leader in the national legal services community who has taken seemingly unwinnable stands in the pursuit of justice. Last October, Texas attorney

 Maria Luisa Mercado was honored for her years of defending underserved constituents, especially farm workers and immigrants. Mercado became a staff attorney for West Texas Legal Services in 1981 after attending Antioch Law School. In 1993, she was named to the LSC Board—a position she still holds today.


Sears Roebuck and Co.
While corporate litigation departments are popularly portrayed as hard-edged, take-no-prisoners outfits, Sears Roebuck and Co. has a softer side. On Feb. 14, the Sears legal department received the 2003 Pro Bono Award from the American Bar Association. Pro bono became a key priority for the company three years ago under the direction of former General Counsel Anastasia Kelly. By last May, Sears had already tripled its hourly commitment to provide free legal assistance. 

Tom Maligno
Law schools are the latest institutions embracing their responsibility to help ensure equal justice (page 4), and on Feb. 3 a leader in this movement was recognized for his pioneering efforts at the Touro College Law Center in Huntington, N.Y. Tom Maligno (center) received the Father Robert Drinan Award of the American Association of Law Schools for furthering “the ethic of pro bono service through personal service, program design, or management.” Maligno joined Touro Law in 1999 after more than two decades of service as an advocate and director at LSC-funded Nassau-Suffolk Legal Services. His accomplishments since entering the world of academia include revitalizing the Public Interest Law Organization at Touro (PILOT) and tripling the number of students participating in public interest job fairs and fellowships.