Corporation for the Poor

For years the young lawyers of California Rural Legal Assistance had been a cactus under conservative Governor Ronald Reagan. But lately they seemed to have come into their own. When Edmund Brown Jr. replaced Reagan, he appointed three former C.R.L.A. lawyers to top state jobs. More recently, C.R.L.A. won a major legal victory abolishing use of the hated short-handled hoe that ruined the backs and health of many farm workers. Nonetheless, C.R.L.A. is currently deep in gloom. Reason: money. Last week all 48 C.R.L.A. lawyers, as well as the rest of the staff, took pay cuts in a desperate attempt to maintain services to their 20,000 annual clients.

The cash crunch has less to do with inflation and recession than with indifference and resistance in Washington. C.R.L.A. is one of 269 local legal-services programs created after 1965 by the now extinct federal Office of Economic Opportunity. In OEO's heyday, its young lawyers lustily sued local authorities across the U.S. on behalf of poor clients, and smarting officials went raging to Washington to throttle the federally funded upstarts. When the Nixon Administration began dismantling the OEO during the early '70s, legal services began to atrophy. But the successes of the OEO lawyers so outweighed their excesses as a way of giving the poor legal help that supporters finally worked out a legislative rescue of sorts: a new Legal Services Corporation, to be funded by Congress but run independently, by eleven board members named by the President and confirmed by the Senate.

After nine months of dawdling and a misguided effort to put two outright foes of legal services on the board, President Ford finally named eleven directors who passed muster in the Senate, and last week they held their first meeting. Chaired by Cornell Law School Dean Roger Cramton, the group ranges from conservative to moderate liberal --though there are no women or representatives from poverty groups. Still, one legal-services activist pronounced himself "pleasantly surprised" after meeting the members. Said Melville Miller, director of Middlesex County Legal Services in New Jersey: "They seemed interested, open-minded and genuinely committed to poor people."

Closed Door. Awaiting the board is a logjam of problems such as those at C.R.L.A. Many local programs have limped along for four or five years with no funding increases. In Springfield, Ill., the legal-services group has had to pass up a number of legitimate suits because it could not afford them. In Seattle, an open-door policy for walk-in business has been closed down in favor of appointments as a way to cut the number of clients.

The Legal Services Corporation ultimately must resolve some philosophical questions about its mission. Conservatives favor handling small, specific problems such as divorces and evictions, but oppose the liberal inclination to bring broad, heavily researched suits that attack root difficulties. For the moment, though, everyone can at least agree on the need for cash. Last week the new board unanimously voted to ask Congress to increase its current $72 million budget by $25 million in an effort to bring C.R.L.A. and other weakened aid programs back to full strength.

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