Doing Something Relevant

Odd as it may seem, the Federal Government spends considerable amounts each year financing law suits against itself. In 1966 the Office of Economic Opportunity (OEO) began to grant some $200,000 annually to a group of New York lawyers who had formed the Center on Social Welfare Policy and Law.

The money was used to counsel welfare-rights organizations, to prepare research for neighborhood legal-aid centers and to initiate court action on behalf of the poor. As it happens, much of the litigation subsidized by the Federal Government has been used to bring successful suits against local, state and federal authorities for slipshod and unconstitutional handling of poverty and welfare programs.

Until just a few years ago, when rising social consciousness focused attention on the inequities and inefficiencies of the welfare system, there was no such thing as welfare law. "The welfare system existed for 30 years without scrutiny or challenge," says Lee Albert, 32, the center's kinetic director.

"The judges themselves are unfamiliar with the legalities of the welfare system." To Burt W. Griffin, OEO's director of legal services, the center "has helped to build the intellectual foundation for a whole new area of law --poverty law."

Spate of Rulings. The center uses tactics developed by civil rights groups. "First we find out in what areas of the law the poor are being shortchanged," says Albert. "Then we search for a plaintiff to represent." The organization has been responsible, in whole or in part, for the spate of recent Supreme Court rulings that have broadened the rights of welfare recipients. In 1966 the high court upheld a decision prohibiting Georgia from denying relief benefits to mothers whom the state deemed able to work. Other cases included a landmark decision against Alabama, which had sought to end payments to mothers either widowed or estranged from their husbands if the women were "cohabiting" with other men. To Alabama authorities, the men were "substitute fathers." Only last month, the court invalidated the residency prerequisite for benefits that had been demanded by 40 states and the District of Columbia. In the fall, Albert will go before the Supreme Court to plead that a recipient has the right to an individual hearing before his aid is cut off.

Despite its impressive accomplishments and imposing title, the center has surprisingly modest resources. Besides the OEO grant, it gets some money from foundations--used mostly to pay staggering travel expenses. It is housed in a refurbished Columbia University apartment on Manhattan's Upper West Side, and its full-time professional staff is composed of only eight young lawyers (average age 28). All could be getting good salaries on Wall Street, but they agree with Director Albert when he says: "I wanted to do something relevant." Albert, who earns $17,000 a year, went to Yale Law School, clerked for U.S. Supreme Court Justice Byron ("Whizzer") White, and taught at the London School of Economics. He now teaches a course at the Columbia Law School. Others, like Ron Pollack, a veteran of Mississippi civil rights campaigns, are paid only $9,000.

Litigation Frontier. The pay does not match the responsibility. Pollack, for example, has been in charge of filing simultaneous suits in 26 states to force authorities to make federally supplied produce and food stamps available to the poor. As he sees it, the suits are not only legal but political as well, publicizing "hunger as a nationwide problem."* A suit filed by OEO-funded California Rural Legal Assistance (working with the center) caused the U.S. district court in California to order the Secretary of Agriculture to distribute food to the needy, regardless of resistance by county officials. Secretary Clifford Hardin has failed to comply. Last week California Rural Legal Assistance filed contempt proceedings against Hardin in federal district court. One Agriculture Department lawyer complained: "It's rather anomalous to have the Government financing suits against itself."

Currently, the OEO itself is being sued by Albert's group. The young lawyers argue that the Hatch Act--prohibiting certain Government employees from engaging in politics--should not apply to OEO community-action workers who may want to politick in their off-hours for poverty-conscious candidates. As for the future, the eight young lawyers will continue to probe what Albert calls "the frontier of welfare litigation." He charges that the Government "doesn't publicize to the poor the laws and programs which benefit them." Specifically, the center will seek to improve the lot of the indigent aged, investigate differences in the caliber of municipal services provided for affluent and poor neighborhoods, and seek to end the continuous spot inspections of which welfare recipients complain. It is also fighting a New York State move to cut welfare payments by some $80 million. The center won the first round by obtaining a court order blocking the reduction, a ruling that is being appealed. If, as Albert expects, the issue goes to the Supreme Court, the result may be to limit the power of states to slash welfare programs. The center could become so effective in pointing up the weaknesses of the present welfare system that the general cry for full-scale overhaul may finally be answered.

*Despite pressures resulting from congressional hearings, the Nixon Administration made known last week that it does not plan any major new expenditure to relieve hunger until at least 1971. Reason: inflation and the budget squeeze.

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