An accidental encounter on a beautiful spring day in April 1975 led to my formal involvement with the nascent Legal Services Corporation. I had come to Washington, D.C., to attend a meeting of the Commission on Revision of the Federal Court System (often referred to as the Hruska Commission after its Chairman, Senator Roman Hruska of Nebraska). A luncheon break led to a stroll through Lafayette Park, where I ran into an acquaintance from my three years of appointive office during the Nixon Administration. My friend, who had stayed on under President Ford as an official in the White House Personnel Office, asked my advice about a current personnel problem that had turned into a political embarrassment: the appointment of the 11-member Board of Directors of the newly created Legal Services Corporation.

In the 1970s public funding of legal services was a front-page story everywhere. The political centrality of the program continued through the Reagan years, while today legal services issues can be found, if at all, only in small stories. Maybe that’s for the best.

The LSC Act of 1974 was the result of nine years of political warfare over the Office of Economic Opportunity’s Legal Services Program—the Johnson Administration’s foray into publicly funded civil legal assistance for the poor through the creation of an executive branch agency. The legislation, a compromise between President Nixon and the program’s congressional supporters and opponents, was the last major bill signed by Nixon in June 1974 before he resigned. The Act required that a board of directors be appointed before the program could be transferred to the Corporation.

President Ford appointed a full slate of nominees in early 1975 but three of them provoked a storm of reaction from the organized bar and legal services supporters. Former Congresswoman Edith Green had sponsored the amendment that restricted backup center activities, and William Knecht had severely criticized California Rural Legal Assistance. Both were said to be opposed to publicly funded legal assistance. The third, Denison Kitchel, was known only as the manager of Barry Goldwater’s 1964 presidential campaign. Eventually, it became clear that these nominees would not receive Senate confirmation.

President Ford, my friend told me, needed to resolve the political issue by appointing knowledgeable and sensible lawyers who would be quickly confirmed. He also needed to appoint a Chairman. Although subsequent Chairs were to be chosen by the Board itself, President Nixon had insisted, and the Act provided, that the initial Chairman was to be designated by the President.

I proposed my law school classmate, Bob Kutak, to chair and direct the Corporation. He had served as a legislative assistant to Senator Hruska after law school and was active in the American Bar Association, including activities that involved the delivery of legal services. In May 1975, my White House friend called to inform me that Kutak could not serve as Chairman because of prior obligations, and had recommended that I fill the position. My nomination, I was told, was seconded by President Ford. So in the summer of 1975, after checking with my university president to make sure the assignment would not interfere with my responsibilities as Dean of Cornell University Law School, I agreed to serve.

President Ford submitted the names of seven new nominees for LSC’s 11-member Board, and on July 9, 1975, we were confirmed by the United States Senate. Five days later, we were sworn in and held our first meeting.

Our initial problems were large, complex, and vital. During the four-year controversy over the establishment of LSC, legal services funding had remained at $71.5 million per year. This static funding occurred during a period of high inflation, resulting in heavy staff turnover, program reductions, and poor morale. Moreover, at that time the program was not a national program but was largely concentrated in major cities and with a bias toward the northeast and California. Ambig­uous statutory language concerning “backup centers”—which provided substantive support to LSC grantees—threatened their continuance and needed prompt attention. Even more basic, LSC was starting out with no executive leadership, no staff, no offices, and no equipment.

Funding and operational needs received the attention of the Board at our initial meeting. For Fiscal Year 1976 we agreed upon an appropriation request to Congress of $96 million, an increase which, if granted, would begin to compensate for four years of relatively high inflation. We also began an intensive search for an LSC President and Vice President who could provide the inspired leadership the program deserved.

But first, more immediate needs had to be addressed. After our initial board meeting, I worked in the evenings with a small group of legal services volunteers from around the country to draft, type, and copy our initial appropriations request. Through the courtesy of Leo Levin, the executive director of the Hruska Commission, we were allowed to use the Commission’s office after business hours. I remember finally finishing the typing, assembly, and photocopying of the required 60 copies at 3 a.m., just seven hours before I testified in front of LSC’s House Appropriations Subcommittee.

Fortunately, our work paid off as Congress approved an LSC increase to $88 million for Fiscal Year 1976 (later upped to $92.3 million with the passage of an additional supplemental appropriation).

That same year, the Board acquired imaginative and resourceful temporary help when Louis Oberdorfer, an able and public-spirited Washington lawyer on sabbatical from his law firm, agreed to provide executive leadership on an interim basis. He brought in David Tatel to work alongside him, and they provided indispensable direction during LSC’s formative period. (Today, Oberdorfer and Tatel are both on the federal bench, Oberdorfer as a senior district judge and Tatel as a circuit court judge.) Oberdorfer and Tatel were aided by Robert Shea of the American Red Cross, whose experience in meeting the emergency needs wrought by natural disasters was a great help to LSC in employing staff, organizing offices, and carrying out a myriad of everyday tasks. Finally, Donald Coppock, former head of the Immigration and Naturalization Service’s Border Patrol, was ingenious in meeting LSC’s infrastructure and equipment needs.

The OEO Legal Services Program had featured an experienced group of lawyers and staff, but we made an early decision not to employ them as a group. Although well-informed on the subject of legal services, there was an internal history of resisting executive control as well as a labor union agreement that would infringe upon the powers of the LSC Board. As a result, OEO employees were considered on an individual basis, and many were hired as LSC employees.

Oberdorfer and Tatel soon tackled the major issues facing the Corporation:

(1) recruiting an outstanding president and vice president, (2) drafting and issuing the initial regulations necessary to operate the legal services program, (3) assuming the management of the existing OEO grantees, and (4) resolving the uncertainty concerning the activities and operations of legal services backup centers. The latter issue was undoubtedly the most controversial. Oberdorfer and Tatel commissioned a study to determine the precise activities of backup centers and their role in the effective delivery of legal services to the poor. It was eventually decided that these units would be permitted to provide expertise to local programs that were helping clients in need of specialized assistance, though they would be barred from soliciting clients to file test cases to change the law. (LSC’s $122 million budget reduction in 1996 brought an end to federal funding of backup centers.)

LSC’s first management team was comprised of three outstanding lawyers: President Tom Ehrlich, Vice President Clinton Bamberger, and General Counsel Alice Daniel. The trio provided the Board with executive leadership that was creative, practical, and effective. By 1980, national goals were established, and LSC-funded programs employed more than 6,000 attorneys that constituted the backbone of a nationwide program that served the civil legal needs of the poor in every U.S. county.

Roger C. Cramton (right) here with Glen Stophel, is the Stevens Professor of Law Emeritus at Cornell University Law School, Cramton was the first LSC Chairman, presiding over the Board of Directors from 1975 to 1978. For his detailed argument on the case for publicly funded legal services for the poor, see "Crisis in Legal Services for the Poor," 26 Villanova L. Rev. 521 (1981)

When I left the LSC Board in mid-1979, LSC’s annual funding had reached $300 million, which is equivalent in today’s dollars to more than $683 million. Regrettably, LSC today receives less than half that amount from Congress in real dollars, and the Corporation’s budget supports fewer than 4,000 staff lawyers to serve substantially more poor Americans. State, local, and private contributions provide an essential supplement to the federal investment.