Poverty law history tells Atlanta aid lawyers' tale

from The Daily Report

By Meredith Hobbs

In 1964, when Robert F. Kennedy, then the U.S. attorney general, chastised an audience of lawyers at the University of Chicago School of Law for their failure to serve the poor, access to the legal system was a luxury—especially in the South, writes Kris B. Shepard in “Rationing Justice: Poverty Lawyers and Poor People in the Deep South.”

With the establishment of a federal Legal Services Program later that year as part of President Johnson's “war on poverty,” legal help for poor people in civil matters started to transform from ad hoc charity work by scattered local legal aid societies to an institutionalized, federally funded system with the goal of providing comprehensive legal services to all people who needed a lawyer but couldn't afford one.

“The phrase 'poverty law' and the notion that there was an area of law that you could go into and make a difference was a new thing. The civil rights movement and the role of attorneys in that awakened people to what lawyers could do,” said Shepard, 34, in a recent interview.

In “Rationing Justice,” which started out as Shepard's doctoral dissertation in history at Emory University and was published by LSU Press earlier this year, he chronicles this sea change in legal aid work in Mississippi, Alabama and Georgia and details the struggles of poverty lawyers to change laws and the way laws were applied that discriminated against the poor, people of color and women.

Shepard uses the very different histories of the two largest programs in the region, the Atlanta Legal Aid Society and North Mississippi Rural Legal Services, to shed light on the diverse currents of the poverty law movement in the Deep South. The nascent Mississippi program was rural with significant African-American leadership and a strong civil rights focus, while the longstanding Atlanta program was mostly white, supported by the local legal establishment and focused on urban issues such as substandard public housing and predatory lending.

Shepard, who is from North Carolina, was initially interested in the welfare rights movement in the South, one of the nation's poorest regions, which was developing at the tail end of the 1960s as the civil rights movement “changed and faded into the background.” Proponents of welfare rights believed that government money for poor people's basic needs was a right—not a charity that government administrators could grant and take away at will for those whom they deemed deserving.

Welfare right piqued his interest in the broader work of poverty lawyers, who believed that poor people—who were disproportionately female and, in the South, African-American—had a right to the services of publicly funded lawyers to sue those treating them unjustly, whether exploitative landlords or discriminatory local agencies. This was a radical departure from the notion that legal aid meant pro bono help with domestic disputes at the discretion of the private bar—and it was particularly resisted in the insular region of the Deep South by many lawyers and politicians.

At the time, low-income people “were accustomed to being sued, and not suing,” recalls a former legal aid attorney, Clarence Cooper, in the book.

“Through poverty lawyers the low-income clients of legal services programs asserted their interests within the American legal system and, in so doing, raised the possibility of profound social change,” Shepard writes.

Atlanta Legal Aid transforms

Atlanta Legal Aid was the only legal aid program in the South with an established presence prior to the advent of federal funding in 1965. Elsewhere in the South, “small legal aid societies appeared and disappeared sporadically in cities such as Mobile, Savannah and Birmingham,” writes Shepard. The Atlanta group was started in 1924 under the leadership of a member of one of the city's leading firms, E. Smythe Gambrell, and by 1960 had a budget of $50,000 and five staff attorneys. Its mission was serving needy individuals—not aggressive social and legal reform.

But by 1969, several green Atlanta Legal Aid lawyers were working with an activist group of public housing tenants called Tenants United for Fairness (TUFF) to pressure the Atlanta Housing Authority for better tenant living conditions. Then they started organizing rent strikes by tenants of rundown private complexes to pressure slumlords to make repairs after one, Steven Gottlieb, discovered an obscure 19th century Georgia case allowing a renter of commercial property to pay for repairs and deduct the expense from the rent.

By 1971, five years after receiving its first federal funding, Atlanta Legal Aid had a budget of about $1 million and 44 staff attorneys in five offices. (Its budget is currently about $9 million with 65 attorneys in five offices.)

These lawyers were part of “a new breed of lawyer,” as Shepard calls the first chapter of his history. They were hired by the reform-minded Michael D. Padnos, who left the federal Office of Economic Opportunity to become Atlanta Legal Aid's director in 1967.

Padnos was “abrasively idealistic,” writes Shepard. “He sought to use the law as a means of social change, and he did so unapologetically, criticizing the Atlanta Housing Authority for abusing its residents, challenging the welfare department to abide by rapidly developing case law, including Supreme Court cases that broadened a recipient's entitlement to public assistance, and initiating educational campaigns to help low-income individuals recognize loan sharks and extortionate business practices.”

After shaking things up, Padnos left Atlanta Legal Aid in 1970. Now retired, he lives in France, where he grows olives and writes, but a number of the attorneys he hired are still working in the Atlanta legal community. A few are still at Atlanta Legal Aid, including Gottlieb, who has run the organization for the past 27 years. Another rent strike agitator, William J. Brennan Jr., heads its Home Defense Program and a third Padnos hire, David A. Webster, serves as senior counsel.

Many notable Atlanta lawyers crop up in Shepard's history—including Mary Margaret Oliver, a longtime member of the General Assembly who worked for the Georgia Legal Services Program, and Cooper, now a federal judge who was Atlanta Legal Aid's first African-American lawyer. Women and African-Americans were still shut out of established law firms in the 1960s and 1970s, and many gained entrée into the legal profession through legal services agencies, writes Shepard.

Georgia Legal Services starts

In the late 1960s, support from the State Bar of Georgia led to the creation of the Georgia Legal Services Program to serve the state's rural counties. Four leaders of the State Bar's Younger Lawyers section, R. William “Bill” Ide III, A. James “Jim” Elliott, Elizabeth E. “Betsy” Neely and S. Phillip Heiner, began documenting the legal problems of the rural poor to build consensus within the bar for a statewide legal aid program. That meant combating the prevailing notion that private attorneys could provide any legal services the poor might need, writes Shepard, adding that the dearth of lawyers outside the state's cities and towns meant very few rural residents had access to legal counsel.

The four presented their report to the State Bar in 1968, which approved the idea under the leadership of its president, H. Sol Clark, a Savannah judge. The group secured $200,000 in federal funding plus matching state funds to get the program going.

Georgia's governor at the time, Lester Maddox, was “intensely racist but an even more fervent supporter of the 'common man,'” writes Shepard. “Lester ate it up. We told him it was for the little people [and we] got our money,” one of the program's founder recalls in the book.

By the end of 1971, the program had offices in Columbus, Gainesville, Macon, Savannah, Albany, Augusta, Brunswick and Dalton staffed by 13 attorneys, who circuit-rode to cover the surrounding countryside. It had grown to 60 staff attorneys by 1974.

The early 1970s, under President Nixon, were lean years for legal aid groups around the country as federal funding contracted and their mission of social reform became more contested, but the Democrat-controlled Congress's creation of the Legal Services Corp. in 1974 solidified legal aid nationally and increased federal funding.

The LSC's goal was “equal access to justice” for all Americans and its leaders set a concrete goal of two poverty lawyers for every 10,000 potential clients to provide “minimum access” to the nation's poor. More than 40 percent, many of them in the South, had no access to legal services at the time, Shepard writes. Before the LSC started funding programs in 1975, there was no legal aid at all in the southern half of Mississippi, outside of Jackson. Federal funding filled “huge holes in coverage” around the country and fueled the expansion of Atlanta Legal Aid, Georgia Legal Services and other developing programs.

By the late 1970s, there was “at least nominal access in virtually every corner of the United States,” Shepard writes. This was the golden era for legal services, which lasted until 1981, when Ronald Reagan took office, vowing to axe funding for the LSC.

Under Reagan, legal aid supporters in Congress accepted funding cuts to keep the program alive. There were further deep cuts in 1996, two years after Republicans, who opposed using tax dollars for legal services, gained control of Congress. The newly Republican Congress also imposed restrictions on legal aid groups receiving federal funding, banning, among other things, class actions, welfare rights cases, certain immigration cases and political lobbying and advocacy.

“I point out in the book that funding would need to be doubled to match today what there was in 1980, adjusted for inflation. And it's not a lot of money. The [LSC] program is funded at about $350 million. That's not a big number for the federal government,” said Shepard, a board member of Legal Aid of North Carolina. “Programs now would tell you that coverage is still very uneven and not sufficient. We've never actually reached the goal of providing counsel to everyone who needed it.”

If a Democrat is elected president next year, legal aid could see funding increases, he said, but probably no lifting of the restrictions on recipient's activities. “There is a centrist bi-partisan coalition that's developed that would be very careful about upsetting the apple cart,” he observed.

From historian to lawyer

Shepard said his work on “Rationing Justice” showed him how lawyers have engaged in issues facing society—including many, like H. Sol Clark and Bill Ide, who were not legal aid lawyers. Compared to historians, he said, “the legal profession tends to be much more attuned to current issues and eager to be involved whether formally through politics or informally.”

And so, after completing his doctoral studies at Emory in 2000, Shepard decided to become a lawyer, receiving his law degree from the University of Virginia in 2003. He is now a corporate attorney advising private investment firms at Robinson, Bradshaw & Hinson in Charlotte, N.C.

“The type of work I do has nothing to do with the book,” he acknowledged, adding that by temperament he's a corporate lawyer, not a litigator. He said working with private equity clients is engaging and intellectually stimulating, since they typically invest in middle market companies with a lot of growth potential—the companies that are producing jobs and creating innovation in the economy.

He added that his firm encourages its lawyers to become involved in the public sphere. “Everyone I meet has an interest to be engaged and struggles to find a way to do that. The interest is there. I think it's built into the profession.”

In addition to his work with Legal Aid of North Carolina, Shepard is on the board of the Levine Museum of the New South. He's also married, with two young children and a third on the way.

Shepard hopes his history of the American poverty law movement will show people that legal services programs are fundamental to American society and not “just another social program to aid the poor.”

“I think it's much more than that, given the importance of the rule of law in our society and in any democratic society. If we talk about the rule of law but we have a system that effectively excludes a huge chunk of the population from being able to use the rule of law, then we've got a problem.

“There are a lot of societies around the world where you can see the breakdown of the rule of law. It can happen anywhere,” he said.

Staff Reporter Meredith Hobbs can be reached at mhobbs@alm.com