The White House Turns Its Attention To Legal Aid With LAIR

The federal government is formally making legal aid a priority.

The President recently created something called the White House Legal Aid Interagency Roundtable. Having the White House focus on legal aid seems like it might be a big deal, but there hasn’t been much fanfare over the Roundtable so it’s hard to tell for sure. What exactly is this Roundtable and how did it come about — and, for that matter, should we even care?

Believe it or not, this story starts at the United Nations. After three years of negotiations, all 193 UN member states recently signed onto a set of seventeen so-called Sustainable Development Goals. These goals are nice and all, but they’re non-binding and, while well-meaning, probably a little overambitious. For example, Goal One is to “end poverty in all its forms everywhere.”

For today’s purposes, let’s focus on the slightly narrower Goal Sixteen: “Promote peaceful and inclusive societies for sustainable development, provide access to justice for all and build effective, accountable and inclusive institutions at all levels.” The goal is narrower than Goal One in the sense that it calls for process — promoting, providing, and building positive institutions — rather than the sweeping, outright elimination of a pervasive societal ill. But that same call for process also leaves a lot more room for interpretation. What exactly does it mean to provide access to justice for all?

Well, in remarks delivered a little over a week ago, Samantha Powers, the United States Ambassador to the UN, identified the problem Goal Sixteen is intended to address:

We know that legal counsel can be a critical tool in obtaining essential services such as education, healthcare, and housing, and in protecting basic rights. Yet we also know that Americans who most need legal assistance to access these services often can’t afford it. And more than 50 million Americans qualify for federally funded civil legal aid; but over half of those who seek assistance are turned away by legal aid organizations that just lack the funds or the staff to take on those cases.

And she announced that an important step to tackling this problem would be a new Presidential Memorandum regarding “Establishment of the White House Legal Aid Interagency Roundtable.”

So what exactly does this memorandum do that’s so important? It formally establishes a body called, of course, the Legal Aid Interagency Roundtable (sometimes abbreviated “LAIR”), comprising roughly twenty representatives from the Attorney General’s office and major federal agencies ranging from the State Department to the United States Department of Agriculture. It gives this body five tasks:

Sponsored

  • “Improve coordination among Federal programs that help the vulnerable and underserved”;
  • “Increase the availability of meaningful access to justice for individuals and families, regardless of wealth or status”;
  • “Develop policy recommendations that improve access to justice” at all levels of government;
  • Work toward implementation of the aforementioned Goal Sixteen; and
  • Conduct research and hand down best practices for civil legal aid and indigent defense.

These sound like the sorts of tasks that bodies like LAIR are convened all the time to tackle, with little or nothing to show for their efforts except maybe contentless, FOIA-able agendas for meetings among bureaucrats. Do we have any reason to hope that LAIR will be any different?

Well, did you notice above that I said the new Presidential Memorandum *formally* establishes LAIR? That’s because it turns out that LAIR has actually *informally* existed since 2012. And, according to the Department of Justice, in its three years of existence it has not been idle. Justice touts an array of improvements, research, and information-sharing, which collectively were deemed valuable enough by the legal aid community that LAIR’s co-chairs received the 2014 Government Service Award from the National Legal Aid & Defender Association. And on his Access to Justice blog, attorney-commentator Richard Zorza has written that a core LAIR product — the “LAIR Toolkit” — is a “major breakthrough.”

So it sounds like additional White House attention to the plight of legal aid attorneys and their clients may indeed be a good and useful thing. And in any event, this new, formally established version of LAIR bears watching. Perhaps it will achieve another major breakthrough (actually, more like a miracle) and identify a stable and adequate source of funding for all civil legal aid and indigent criminal defense throughout the country. One can dream.


Sponsored

Sam Wright is a dyed-in-the-wool, bleeding-heart public interest lawyer who has spent his career exclusively in nonprofits and government. If you have ideas, questions, kudos, or complaints about his column or public interest law in general, send him an email at PublicInterestATL@gmail.com.