Richard A. "Dick"

Cullison

Nominated by Brenda L. Combs

"Richard A. “Dick” Cullison served as executive director of Legal Aid of the Bluegrass (LABG) for 36 years until 2014. Under his leadership, LABG grew from five lawyers providing civil legal services to low-income people in Northern Kentucky to a $4-million non-profit law firm with nineteen lawyers serving 33 Kentucky counties.
    
Dick’s legal career started at legal aid in 1975 as a Chase Law School extern. After graduation, he clerked for a Kentucky Supreme Court Justice, and returned to legal aid in 1977 as a staff attorney. He became litigation director in 1980, and in 1984, executive director. During his tenure, he led groundbreaking litigation like jail conditions cases, class action litigation challenging Kentucky’s AFDC unemployed parent program wrongful implementation and public housing initiatives, among others; and successfully brokered two mergers with legal aid programs in Morehead and Lexington.

Dick was always elbow-deep in emerging legal issues. With an Equal Justice Works fellow, he started the first Kentucky legal services project for undocumented immigrants of domestic violence. With private lawyers and other legal aids, he took on Kentucky’s Medicaid change denying the homebound and nursing home residents their rightful Medicaid access. He shepherded the controversial Baby Justin case involving an adoption between low-income Kentucky parents and an affluent Ohio couple where the birth parents requested the baby be returned within the window of the adoption agreement. The adoptive couple strung out the case until the child was two, launching a national campaign that landed in all the wrong courts—public opinion and the national media—Oprah Winfrey, 60 minutes, Rikki Lake, a morning news show, most showing only the adoptive parents sympathetically. LABG did not back down because Dick believed that issues of justice for low-income families should not be decided by the media or the masses, but by the courts, and our legal aid and pro bono lawyers armed with the facts could meet the plaintiff’s lawyers there on equal ground.

After 1996, Dick worked with other Kentucky legal aid directors and the state support office to rehome the legal work that LABG could no longer do and spun up the Kentucky Equal Justice Center. In 2010, Dick helped launch the Access to Justice Commission, an arm of the Kentucky Supreme Court, to address equal justice issues and fund the state’s legal aid. With others, Dick worked to win a Kentucky filing fee add-on and a general fund appropriation victory in the legislature.

Dick won awards from Chase Law School, the KBA and Northern Kentucky Volunteer Lawyers and LABG received the 2005 ABA Hodson Award under his leadership. For several years, he wrote newspaper articles educating people about poverty issues. After retirement across three states, he went on to serve as Interim Director for two other legal aids and helped three conduct strategic planning. The true measure of his commitment as a “champion of justice” was his unceasing, deep seated vision of justice for all—be it Kentuckian, Tennessean, South Carolinian, American. Justice For All."