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At the end of the public interest law movement’s first generation, there has been a resurgence of scholarly interest in charting the organization, practice, and meaning of public interest law in the contemporary era. This essay appraises public interest law’s professional inheritance, identifying four critical developments in the field—professionalism, privatization, conservatism, and globalization—and suggesting the challenges they pose for the future of public interest law.

The author discusses the influence of professionalization and the expansion of opportunities in public interest practice, the relation between public interest practice and the private market, focusing on the range of practice sites and the tradeoffs presented in each, the ways in which political conservatism has reshaped the field of public interest law, and the impact of globalization on public interest law.

As the field of public interest law has expanded, there appears to be more institutional support for the development of public interest law careers. As public interest law has become a conventional occupation, it has provided greater career stability and clearer professional ladders. However, there may be downsides to professionalization because public interest lawyers practice in larger organizational settings with more bureaucratized environments and higher proportions of non-lawyer staff. The comforts of professionalism may contribute to deradicalization.

The political backlash to the legal services program’s liberal agenda resulted in efforts to privatize the program and resulted in significant budget cuts that forced legal services offices to rely more heavily on foundations, law firms, individuals, and state and local government funding. Big firm pro bono has grown and there has also been an increase in public interest law firms that take on pro bono work for the opportunity to collect attorney’s fees. The law school clinic has also become a significant force in public interest law. The rise of pro bono may have implications for commitment and expertise and the quality of services provided and may result in certain categories of cases receiving less attention.

The rise of political conservatism has resulted in a declining role of the federal government as the guarantor of the legal rights associated with political liberalism. The ideological shift in the federal judiciary has moved the judiciary to a constitutional vision that is skeptical of economic regulation and claims of minority rights. This has resulted in a shift among liberal groups from doing legal work to spending more time on research, education, and outreach as well as more engagement in legislative work. The increase of the conservative influence has also resulted in a successful effort to restrict the scope of advocacy that can be undertaken by legal aid lawyers to the most routine individual service cases.

Globalization issues that have impacted the ways in which public interest law is practiced include increases in and changes in the pattern of immigration, the search for investment opportunities and low-cost production locales, and the development of an effort by public interest lawyers to import the norms and methods built through international struggle to contest what they view as the erosion of domestic legal standards resulting from new American policy imperatives.

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By Susan R. Jones, JD and Shirley J. Jones, PhD | 33 U. ARK. LITTLE ROCK L. REV. 377 (2010).

This article describes innovative approaches to integrating public service into law school and graduate social work curricula through the overarching lens of action search, a broad term encompassing service and action learning, and a pedagogical approach designed to educate students while helping communities.

Action research is a participatory way of learning which includes the components of action and service learning. Action research is an educational tool that intertwines “justice” and “participation” to influence positive concrete change and development in communities. As teachers, scholars and community advocates, the authors have utilized action research and clinical legal education to prepare students to become helping professionals within their roles as future members of civil society. Through this work, the authors have come to view action research as an innovative way to teach students not only the substantive doctrine, skills, professional values, and ethics of their professions, but also client advocacy, community and capacity building, and issues relevant to social and economic justice.

The authors use their experiences in law and social work to illustrate teaching methods to promote students’ awareness of social justice issues in their own communities and abroad, while also building and fortifying relationships between students and the clients or communities they are called to serve. The article also advocates for “institutionalized action research,” a term used to describe full acceptance and immersion of action research into the cultural and education fabric of colleges and universities; greater recognition of this pedagogy in light of global economic realities; the needs of millennial generation students; and calls for increased experiential learning opportunities in graduate education.

The authors present case studies that describe their experiences in social and law, illuminating the action researcher’s multiple roles as facilitator, participant, student, and education. The authors also discuss key outcomes from the case study projects, observations, lessons learned and recommendations.

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This article deals with the history and current status of public interest law. It reexamines the seminal work of the 1970s that established public interest law and contrasts the early period with the complexities and challenges today.

The paper opens with a discussion of the key aspects of the public interest enterprise in the 1970s based on an analysis of three key documents. In the late 1960s and early 1970s, young lawyers, leaders of the Bar, and the Ford Foundation created a new institution for the legal profession: the non-profit law firm which set out to advocate on behalf of disadvantaged and underrepresented groups, expanding upon and enhancing earlier civil rights lawyering and poverty legal work. These founders created a well-thought out vision of how to create a major set of institutions that could expand the roles of lawyers and place them in central positions in the dynamic changes taking place in American society. The key documents that express and created this vision and strategy are the Public Interest Law: An Economic and Institutional Analysis, (Weisbrod); “The Public Interest Law Firm: New Voices for New Constituencies, “ (Harrison and Jaffe); and Balancing the Scales of Justice: Financing Public Interest Law in America. These documents provide a well-developed vision and strategy, a new institutional form for practicing law, an expanded professional role for lawyers, a business plan for the financing of these firms and lawyers, and a theoretical and institutional justification for the firms. The enterprise is influencing legal professions and social movements throughout the world and the institutional innovations started in the 1970s have been successful and public interest law has become a permanent part of the U.S. legal system.

Next, the article highlights where we are today by focusing on two unfinished projects: inequality in society and the limits of the regulatory process. Lawyers today are adapting to the 1970s canonical concepts of public interest law in ways that allow them to recommit to the goals and deal with these unfinished projects by forging new tools and practices that are appropriate for today’s more complex context. The author discusses the development of innovative practices and institutions which are redesigning the original concepts of non-profit law firms, appropriate lawyer roles, financial sustainability and the proper functioning of U.S. liberal legalism. This reconstruction can be summed up as increased collaboration, new lawyer roles, additional sources of funding, and recognition of the fragility in the enterprise. A major institutional realignment is occurring with a focus on creating collaborative groups and networks across type of public interest groups, law schools profession and community groups.

Financing public interest lawyers continues to be a challenge. The article discusses the impact of Loan Repayment Assistance Programs, and fellowship and scholarship programs in encouraging law school graduates to pursue public interest careers. The adoption of pro bono programs by law schools and the bar is a major success story becoming an important aspect of both corporate law firm practice and the provision of public interest law services for civil legal services.

Finally, the author discusses the fact that U.S. lawyers are using international laws and networks as opportunities to assist American workers in the areas of immigration and outsourcing of jobs.

The author concludes that the projects of reducing inequality and empowering the unorganized are once again major challenges, but the impressive forty-year history of the public interest law enterprise serves as a signal that a meaningful life in the law can be a realistic goal. Despite the continued financial struggles for many public interest lawyers and firms, jobs exist and are an influential sector of the U.S. profession. The true success of the public interest law enterprise is demonstrated by its ability to motivate lawyers to adapt and revise the practice to meet today’s challenges with today’s tools.

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The legal needs of the poor have long outstripped the resources available in the legal community to meet those needs. This does not in any way discount the substantial contribution of direct funding and services provided by individual lawyers. There are, however, other factors that shape the supply side of the marketplace for the delivery of legal services to persons of limited means – and it is the supply side that interests us. The recent economic downturn provided law firms and legal service providers with the opportunity to examine the business models that support and provide mechanisms for the delivery of legal services through the pro bono contributions of individual lawyers. This article examines the challenges and opportunities experienced by the legal services provider community in a large metropolitan area during a period of economic downturn.
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Every year nearly half of the requests for legal assistance received by Arkansas’s two legal aid providers are turned away because there is not enough staff or pro bono volunteers to take these cases. Limited attorney resources, lack of predictable funding sources, and other challenges have created a gap in access to justice for many people. The justice gap is widened further because there are many hard-to-reach populations.

Rule of Professional Conduct 6.1 states that all attorneys should aspire to provide at least fifty hours of pro bono legal services each year. With over 8000 Arkansas-licensed attorneys who are ethically obligated to help meet the needs of over half a million low-income Arkansans, the bench and bar of this state should be doing its part to close the justice gap in our state.

In August of 2003, the Arkansas Bar Association petitioned the Arkansas Supreme Court to create a statewide access to justice commission, the purpose of which was to coordinate efforts to improve access to the civil justice system for low-income Arkansans who cannot afford attorneys to represent them in civil matters. Since its establishment on December 18, 2003, the Arkansas Access to Justice Commission has seen significant success on a number of funding and policy initiatives which are discussed in this article.

While the successes of the Arkansas Access to Justice Commission and Arkansas Access to Justice Foundation represent important strides, this is largely overshadowed by the continuing and significant unmet need for civil legal help among low-income Arkansans. We still have a long way to go to ensure that all Arkansans have equal access to the civil justice system.

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By Daniel Haney | 33 U. ARK. LITTLE ROCK L. REV. 465 (2010).

Many football teams and stadiums (or any other live entertainment venue for that matter), do not provide captioning or similar accommodations to deaf fans and spectators. With the advancing technologies in communications that are constantly emerging and the regulations that the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) contains, live entertainment venues should not deny the deaf equal enjoyment of any entertainment that the venue can reasonably make accessible. Although the deaf have succeeded some in using the legal system to expand captioning to more live entertainment venues, the expansion has not been widespread and the legal instructions regarding this expansion have been limited.

This note explores the likely arguments that the deaf may bring though Title II and Title III of the ADA to acquire captioning at live entertainment events, as well as the outcomes these arguments will likely produce. Part II of the not charts the history and functions of captioning, the struggles and progress the deaf have had in obtaining captioning for areas of entertainment including television and movies, the history and functions of Title II and Title III of the ADA, and the recent struggles deaf individuals have incurred in requesting captioning at live entertainment. Part III discusses the available technologies that stadiums, arenas, and other venues may use to provide the deaf with equal access to their entertainment, the deaf community’s rights under Title II and Title II of the ADA, the arguments they provide in favor of the deaf community’s access to captioning, and the arguments they may provide state and private entities as to why they may not be required to provide captioning for the deaf. Part IV concludes that through Title II and Title II of the ADA, and through current technology, captioning should expand to provide the deaf with equal access to stadiums, arenas, and other entertainment venues.

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