John Levi, 2023 End of the Year Message
As another testing but productive year draws to a close, and LSC’s 50th Anniversary year beckons, I want to thank you for the extraordinary efforts you have made to further the vital mission we share to expand access to justice to all Americans
The more than 10,000 lawyers and staff at LSC’s 131 grantees across the country once again displayed tremendous determination and imagination to stretch your limited resources to help as many people as possible in the face of serious challenges
Although the pandemic loosened its grip on the country, you continued to deal with the problems it created or exacerbated, such as a rise in domestic violence (up more than 9% since 2021) and expanding housing insecurity issues, which were worsened by the end of eviction moratoria, rental assistance initiatives and eviction diversion programs. In fact, in 2022, 41.3% of the cases closed by LSC grantees were housing cases, the first time one case type comprised such a large portion of your cases.
In recognition of this profound challenge, LSC’s Housing Task Force released four issue briefs on legal problems related to housing insecurity, covering illegal evictions, manufactured housing, extended-stay motels and contracts for deed housing arrangements. Together, the series paints a picture of how housing situations that are financially accessible to low-income individuals and families often present legal pitfalls that can jeopardize their housing and finances.
Housing insecurity is a pressing problem for veterans and was the focus of LSC’s annual Veterans Day forum which featured Florida Rep. Laurel Lee and leading veterans advocates.
Many LSC grantees also struggled to meet the civil legal needs created by hurricanes, wildfires, earthquakes, floods and severe storms. More than 4.75 million people in areas affected by these natural disasters this year qualified for LSC-funded legal aid.
LSC continued its efforts by awarding nearly $20 million in disaster relief funding to 14 grantees. This emergency supplemental funding was included in the FY 2023 appropriations act passed by Congress.
For the FY 2024 appropriations act, the White House submitted a supplemental request to Congress that included $21 million in disaster relief for LSC. This was the first time that the White House included funds for LSC in a request for disaster relief, and it represents a significant milestone in LSC’s continued efforts through its Disaster Task Force and other initiatives to demonstrate that civil legal services providers are a critical component of comprehensive disaster recovery.
Throughout the year, LSC continued to raise public awareness of the crisis in civil legal aid at access to justice forums in conjunction with LSC Board meetings in Phoenix, Washington, D.C. New York City and Los Angeles and through our compelling podcast, Talk Justice.
LSC continued to be a national leader in technology through its Innovations in Technology Conference in Phoenix and through its Technology Initiative Grants program, now in its 23rd year.
Since 2014, LSC has also supported pro bono efforts through its Pro Bono Innovation Fund. In April, the Board made an important addition to LSC leadership by appointing Tom Yatsco as the new Inspector General.
In 2024, LSC will enter a milestone year, its 50th Anniversary. On July 25, 1974, President Richard Nixon signed the LSC Act, noting that legal assistance for the poor protects a basic right:
“We have learned that legal assistance for the poor, when properly provided, is one of the most constructive ways to help them help themselves,” he said. “We propose, simply, to protect and preserve a basic right for all Americans.”
This basic right, equal access to justice, is a foundational promise of the American experiment, and LSC is dedicating its 50th Anniversary commemoration to celebrating and preserving it in a campaign we have entitled Protecting the Promise.
The many projects, events and initiatives we have planned for this coming year across the country will shed new light on a wide variety of issues relating to equal access to justice and our urgent need to do much more to protect this core value.
As the late Stanford law professor and scholar Deborah Rhode observed:
“‘Equal justice under law’ is one of America’s most proudly proclaimed and routinely violated legal principles. It embellishes courthouse doors, but in no way describes what goes on behind them. Millions of Americans lack any access to justice let alone equal access.”
LSC’s 2022 Justice Gap Report quantifies this observation, revealing that low-income Americans do not receive any or enough legal help for 92% of their substantial civil legal problems.
So as grateful as we are that Congress has increased LSC funding to $560 million, clearly much, much more is needed to close the justice gap which has been driven in large part by years of wholly inadequate resourcing.
For FY 1994—30 years ago—Congress appropriated $400 million for LSC. Our current appropriation has increased only modestly since then, not remotely enough to keep up with inflation, much less the increased demand and need for services resulting from recessions, population growth and the pandemic that have occurred over the last three decades. I am sure that those visionaries who advocated so effectively for the founding of LSC would be so very proud of the work of our grantees, but at the same time I think they would be dismayed at the lack of appropriate funding.
In March, LSC requested from Congress an appropriation of $1.5 billion for its FY 2024 budget. This request attempts to account for the ongoing serious lack of adequate resources to address the nation’s widening justice gap.
The civil justice gap, however, is about more than a lack of resources. It’s also about perception, the belief that civil justice challenges are somehow less pressing than criminal ones and not worthy of the same financial commitments or the criminal system’s guarantee of a lawyer.
But that is not necessarily the case, as Rowan Wilson, the Chief Judge of the New York Court of Appeals, forcefully argued in July at LSC’s Forum on Access to Justice in New York City:
“There are some civil matters that have a more catastrophic real-world consequence than some criminal matters,” he said, noting that he would rather spend 30 days in jail than lose his home or custody of his children. And yet only Americans facing criminal charges have the right to an attorney.
"We are not doing nearly enough,” Judge Wilson argued, to help people facing potentially life-changing civil issues.
We intend the commemoration of LSC’s anniversary to be a wakeup call to help educate the public about and protect the promise of access to justice for those facing these civil issues.
The stakes are extraordinarily high, as Ivan Fong, the Executive Vice President and General Counsel and Secretary at Medtronic, observed at LSC’s access to justice forum in Washington, DC in March.
"When people don't have access to justice, or even perceive that they can't get a fair shake in our court system, that erodes our commitment to equal justice under the law and to the rule of law. The consequence of this failure... is that it risks causing people to lose faith in our democratic system and our system of justice.”
As we launch this coming year, our Protect the Promise campaign in partnership with you, LSC will seek to raise even greater awareness of the importance of access to justice, engage our supporters by building communities of stakeholders across the country and recruit new advocates from many sectors of society.
Every advocate is important.
In a 1964 speech at the University of Chicago Law School, then Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy called for lawyers to do more to provide legal assistance for the poor, nothing that “each time a man stands up for an ideal . . . or acts to improve the lot of others, or strikes out against injustice, he sends forth a tiny ripple of hope, and those ripples build a current which can sweep down the mightiest walls. . . .”
Ten years later, the ripple Bobby Kennedy built in his remarks became the current known as the Legal Services Corporation, and for five decades it has joined with you in sweeping away many barriers to equal access to justice for low-income Americans.
As we recognize our 50th anniversary, we will redouble our commitment and efforts with you to work to finally protect the promise of equal justice in America and help make it become a lived reality for all Americans.