Legal Aid Programs Pros And Cons

Prior to the formation of the federal Office of Economic Opportunity (OEO) in 1964, there was not a national entity that provided any sort of funding and structure for legal aid programs across the county. Between 1920 and 1930, thirty new legal aid programs were developed, and annual caseloads increased from 171,000 in 1920 to 307,000 in 1932. These programs operated in relative isolation from one another. There was hardly any coordination of services and communication about best practices, but they all had one thing in common – they were drastically underfunded. “It has been estimated that during its early years, legal aid reached less than 1 percent of those in need,” (Houseman and Perle, 11). In fact, in 1963, one year before the formation
One of the first and most notable controversies came from then Governor of California Ronald Reagan in 1967. Governor Reagan worked with Senator George Murphy (CA-R) to attempt to prohibit OEO-funded programs from suing federal, state, and local government agencies. However, this attempt was failed in the Senate by a sizeable margin. Then in 1973, President Nixon sought to completely dismantle OEO, and he appointed a new director of OEO – Howard Phillips – to do just that. While Phillips efforts to dismantle federally funded legal services were ultimately unsuccessful, he weakened the programs by implementing month-to-month funding, eliminating the requirement to advocate for law and policy reform, and defunding the migrant legal services
In 1971, President Nixon proposed legislation to create the Legal Services Corporation (LSC) – a private, non-profit entity that would receive funds appropriated by Congress and administer them to local legal aid programs. The President’s bill included a number of restrictions on the type of legal services that were eligible for funding. The bill did not pass. President Nixon tried again in 1973 with another bill to create LSC, and this time it included more restrictions than the first bill. After making its way through the House and Senate, the bill passed but with only a few of the proposed restrictions, including restrictions on lobbying, limiting class actions, and prohibiting abortion litigation. Signed by President Nixon in August 1974, the Legal Services Corporation Act of 1974 was one of the last bills that the President signed before resigning from