Everyday Justice

Ashley Wiltshire

Description

The Legal Aid Society’s mission is to advance, defend, and enforce the legal rights of low-income and otherwise vulnerable people in order to secure for them the basic necessities of life. Everyday Justice is an on-the-ground history of the Legal Aid Society of Middle Tennessee and the Cumberlands, the story of how national debates about access to justice have impacted the work of its lawyers, and a warning about why the federally imposed limits on that work must be lifted in order to fulfill the pledge of justice for all.

Those surviving on low incomes often see the legal system as an oppressive force stacked against them. Everyday Justice is about lawyers trying to make the law work for these people. This book traces the development and evolution of legal aid in Middle Tennessee from the late 1960s to the turn of the millennium, as told by Ashley Wiltshire, who worked for the Legal Aid Society of Middle Tennessee and the Cumberlands in all its incarnations for four decades, beginning a year after its inception.

Set in the context of the legal aid movement in the United States—beginning as a part of the social awakening in the post–Civil War era, continuing with volunteer efforts in the first part of the twentieth century, and coming to fruition beginning with the OEO Office of Legal Services grants of the 1960s as part of the War on Poverty—Everyday Justice is a story of Nashville, which levied an extended period of opposition because of prevailing cultural and religious views on race and poverty.
The man in the back of the room stood up and pointed at me, “There he is, boys. I told you this would happen, and there he is . . .”

I had just finished my presentation to the Sumner County Bar Association in its meeting at the Gallatin Country Club, talking about our plan at Legal Services of Nashville to open a legal aid office in their town to serve low-income people in three suburban/rural counties. The man pointing his finger at me, I learned later, was the circuit court judge for that area. Like many lawyers in our state, he was convinced that Legal Services lawyers were a danger to society and to the legal profession. Twelve years earlier, two leaders of the Tennessee Bar Association had written in the association’s quarterly journal that Legal Services was a part of “a headlong plunge into socialism.” The title of their impassioned article was “Et tu, Brute!”

In 1974, three years before my fateful trip to the country club, a committee appointed by the Nashville Bar Association, after a year-long investigation, found that three of us had committed “unprofessional conduct of the worst sort” by representing people with developmental disabilities against the state, which had been warehousing them without recourse in deplorable conditions. The committee recommended that the bar association board reprimand us for our actions and insisted that the board of our organization should “assure that this sort of thing is discontinued.”

As we will see during the progress of our story, each of these venomous confrontations eventually had a positive outcome, emblematic of some of the profound changes that will occur in the bar, as well as in the law and in society, over the course of our time. This is a story about the struggle to establish civil legal aid in one place in the American South, about the early instability of Legal Services of Nashville, and about its evolution into an effective and broadly supported organization that has provided representation to vulnerable people who were, and often still are, disadvantaged by their lack of access to all parts of our legal system. It is a story about the wide variety of civil legal cases we handled for our clients and some of the improvements we were able to obtain through those cases.

The opposition and the backlash that we encountered was not and should not be surprising. Many of our cases challenged societal status quo, racial prejudice, bureaucratic lethargy, and business as usual. They disclosed injustices and called for radical changes. They required thoughtful remedies from courageous judges, responsive legislators, and diligent administrators. And thankfully there is no lack of heroes throughout the story in all three branches of government, judges and other public officials who responded effectively to the plight of our clients.
Introduction
1. Early Legal Aid, National and Nashville: 1863–1965
2. Establishing Legal Services of Nashville: 1965–1969
3. Conflicts Inside and Out: 1969–1973
4. Wide-Ranging Advocacy: 1973–1976
5. We Grow: 1976–1980
6. Nasty, Brutish, and Long
7. Mostly Drake
8. Women Lawyers Challenge Domestic Violence
9. Family Dramas
10. Young Lawyers Change Juvenile Law
11. Bless This House
12. Caveat Emptor
13. Five Women Reform Industrial Insurance
14. Hospitals, Banks, Automobile Dealers, and the United Way
15. Doomsday: 1981–1991
16. It’s an Ill Wind That Blows No Good
17. Healthcare and Paying for It
18. Social Security Disability
19. Justice Is Everybody’s Business
20. High Hopes, Doomsday II, and Then Consolidation: 1992–2002
21. A Unique Practice of Law
Epilogue
Acknowledgments
Abbreviations
Notes
Bibliography
Index

Sujets

• Civil Rights
• Droit et juridique
• Justice and the Poor
• National Legal Aid & Defender Association
• Leland Clure Morton
• Baptist Hospital (Nashville)
• Hill?Burton Act
• Earl Johnson
• Legal Services Corporation
• Patrick F. McManus
• Interest on Lawyer Trust Accounts
• Suffix (name)
• Contract with America
• Civil and political rights
• Law
• JR
• Sargent Shriver

Informations

• Publié par: Vanderbilt University Press
• Date de parution: 15 janvier 2023
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9780826505118
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 1 Mo

Extrait

Everyday Justice
Everyday Justice
A Legal Aid Story
ASHLEY WILTSHIRE
Vanderbilt University Press
NASHVILLE, TENNESSEE
Copyright 2023 Vanderbilt University Press
All rights reserved
First printing 2023
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Wiltshire, Ashley T., Jr., 1941- author.
Title: Everyday justice : a legal aid story / Ashley T. Wiltshire, Jr.
Description: Nashville, Tennessee : Vanderbilt University Press, 2023. | Includes bibliographical references.
Identifiers: LCCN 2022011432 (print) | LCCN 2022011433 (ebook) | ISBN 9780826505101 (paperback) | ISBN 9780826505118 (epub) | ISBN 9780826505125 (pdf)
Subjects: LCSH: Legal aid--Tennessee, Middle--History. | Practice of law--Tennessee, Middle--History. | Justice, Administration of--Tennessee--History. | Law--Tennessee--History.
Classification: LCC KFT84.5.P7 W55 2023 (print) | LCC KFT84.5.P7 (ebook) | DDC 347.768/017--dc23/eng/20221031
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022011432
LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022011433
To Callie Mae Newsom, Jean Stacey, Denzil White, and the thousands of others who trusted their problems to us
and to those good souls in the bar and the community who helped us along the way
Contents
Introduction
1. Early Legal Aid, National and Nashville: 1863–1965
2. Establishing Legal Services of Nashville: 1965–1969
3. Conflicts Inside and Out: 1969–1973
4. Wide-Ranging Advocacy: 1973–1976
5. We Grow: 1976–1980
6. Nasty, Brutish, and Long
7. Mostly Drake
8. Women Lawyers Challenge Domestic Violence
9. Family Dramas
10. Young Lawyers Change Juvenile Law
11. Bless This House
12. Caveat Emptor
13. Five Women Reform Industrial Insurance
14. Hospitals, Banks, Automobile Dealers, and the United Way
15. Doomsday: 1981–1991
16. It’s an Ill Wind That Blows No Good
17. Healthcare and Paying for It
18. Social Security Disability
19. Justice Is Everybody’s Business
20. High Hopes, Doomsday II, and Then Consolidation: 1992–2002
21. A Unique Practice of Law
Epilogue
Acknowledgments
Abbreviations
Notes
Bibliography
Index
Introduction
The man in the back of the room stood up and pointed at me, “There he is, boys. I told you this would happen, and there he is . . .”
I had just finished my presentation to the Sumner County Bar Association in its meeting at the Gallatin Country Club, talking about our plan at Legal Services of Nashville to open a legal aid office in their town to serve low-income people in three suburban/rural counties. The man pointing his finger at me, I learned later, was the circuit court judge for that area. Like many lawyers in our state, he was convinced that Legal Services lawyers were a danger to society and to the legal profession. Twelve years earlier, two leaders of the Tennessee Bar Association had written in the association’s quarterly journal that Legal Services was a part of “a headlong plunge into socialism.” The title of their impassioned article was “Et tu, Brute!”
In 1974, three years before my fateful trip to the country club, a committee appointed by the Nashville Bar Association, after a year-long investigation, found that three of us had committed “unprofessional conduct of the worst sort” by representing people with developmental disabilities against the state, which had been warehousing them without recourse in deplorable conditions. The committee recommended that the bar association board reprimand us for our actions and insisted that the board of our organization should “assure that this sort of thing is discontinued.”
As we will see during the progress of our story, each of these venomous confrontations eventually had a positive outcome, emblematic of some of the profound changes that will occur in the bar, as well as in the law and in society, over the course of our time. This is a story about the struggle to establish civil legal aid in one place in the American South, about the early instability of Legal Services of Nashville, and about its evolution into an effective and broadly supported organization that has provided representation to vulnerable people who were, and often still are, disadvantaged by their lack of access to all parts of our legal system. It is a story about the wide variety of civil legal cases we handled for our clients and some of the improvements we were able to obtain through those cases.
The opposition and the backlash that we encountered was not and should not be surprising. Many of our cases challenged societal status quo, racial prejudice, bureaucratic lethargy, and business as usual. They disclosed injustices and called for radical changes. They required thoughtful remedies from courageous judges, responsive legislators, and diligent administrators. And thankfully there is no lack of heroes throughout the story in all three branches of government, judges and other public officials who responded effectively to the plight of our clients.
People living in poverty historically have had at best an uneasy relationship with the law. More commonly, they have seen the law as an instrument of oppression. Lawyers and judges were the men who evicted them from their homes, levied garnishments on their paychecks, repossessed their furniture, and allowed businesses to cheat them out of their wages. A poignant illustration from Nashville, but certainly relevant to other places as well: the bar association established a Legal Aid Bureau in 1914, but the chair of the organizing committee had to report the next year that “not as many poor people have availed themselves of the Bureau as could have been due to a feeling of suspicion.” 1 And doubtless his report referred strictly to the suspicions of poor White people. If even considered at all, one can only imagine the suspicions of Black people, who experienced not only the usual deprivations of the poor, but also the oppression of life under Jim Crow laws and economic discrimination.
Courts traditionally have been bastions of conservatism, protecting the status quo. Legislatures traditionally have reflected the interests of those who have the most influence with them, those who have power and stature in the community. With a few exceptions at times of crisis, such as the 1930s, the courts and legislatures during our history for the most part have effectively ignored the plight of the poor and resisted reforms that would improve their plight. For a brief time beginning in the 1950s and 1960s, that pattern changed. The civil rights movement and President Lyndon Johnson’s War on Poverty brought to the fore the issues of the poor and dispossessed. Congress passed laws, and courts began to recognize that civil rights should be accorded to people who previously had no claim on them. The courts momentarily allowed or even led social change. It was a brief window; the progress was uneven, and not without stubborn opposition. That is the setting for quite a bit of our story. As we will see, in a number of the larger cases described in our narrative, our clients’ cause benefited from that climate. Indeed, the beginning of federally funded legal services for the poor happened because of that climate. But as we also will see, beginning in the 1980s and profoundly in the 1990s, that window closed. Congress and state legislatures, determined to make America like it was again, rolled back reforms, and an increasingly conservative judiciary reverted to its accustomed role of preserving the hegemony of the dominant culture.
Though this book tells a story about one group of lawyers at one time and in one place who every day engaged in the struggle for equal justice on behalf of their clients, it is not a local story only. Every story is a part of a longer history and a wider context. As the first chapter will describe, the organized effort for legal aid goes back nearly 160 years. Many of the chapters that follow will describe how national debates had an impact on the operation of our local organization and the representation of our clients. The national debate is this: to what extent should we as a nation support full and equal access to justice for those who can least afford it? Because the major funding source for civil legal aid since 1965 has been an office of the federal government, the answers to that question by various presidents and members of Congress over the years has had a profound effect on our work and on the lives of low-income people in our country.
As will be explained briefly in Chapters 1 and 5 , federal funding for civil legal aid first was provided through the Office of Economic Opportunity’s Office of Legal Services (OEO/OLS) as a part of the War on Poverty. In 1974, however, as OEO was being dismantled by the Nixon administration, Congress, in a rescue action, created the Legal Services Corporation (LSC) and transferred the funding and administration of the program to that entity. It survives, but not without scars.
For reasons of definition and containment, our story-in-chief covers only thirty-three years, 1969 to 2002, though there are pre-histories and many post-scripts. What originated in 1969 as Legal Services of Nashville (LSON), later became the Legal Aid Society, over the years changed its name several times as it expanded geographically, and at the defined end of our narrative, because of our consolidation with Rural Legal Services of Tennessee (Rural) and Legal Services of South Central Tennessee (South Central), took on the long and encompassing name of Legal Aid Society of Middle Tennessee and the Cumberlands. To avoid anachronisms as I tell the story, I will use the name appropriate to the time of the events being described.
Any telling of history has a point of view. It is a narrative in which the author selects, sequences, and interprets in order to suit one’s purpose in the telling. Despite those who might pretend otherwise, history never is objective, and that is emphatically the case when