Lawyers: The Missionaries

Many of the Supreme Court's recent criminal-law decisions have a common element: in one way or another, they reflect the law's discrimination against the poor. They have challenged the adequacy of the bar's long tradition of giving free help through legal-aid societies. Case after case has been a reminder that by waiting for clients to come to them—often in offices far from the slums—legal-aid services have apparently failed to reach vast numbers of people who need them, in civil as well as criminal matters.

In 1964 legal-aid societies as well as public defenders tackled 620,000 cases. Yet the American Bar Foundation estimates that 1,400,000 indigents a year are tried without lawyers in U.S. courts —to say nothing of the problems that afflict millions of other poor Americans whose rights are often routinely ignored by landlords, merchants and faceless welfare agencies. The result, say experts, is the breeding of a dangerous disbelief in equal justice.

Muscle for the Poor. One promising new remedy is to supplement legal-aid societies by setting up storefront "neighborhood law offices"—in effect, to send legal missionaries into low-income areas to educate the poor in how to assert their rights. In New Haven last year, for example, the Ford Foundation financed the prototype New Haven Legal Assistance Association Inc. Traditionalists raised a cry of "socialized law," warning, in the words of one lawyer, that "you cheapen the legal profession by putting it in a storefront and soliciting business." The county bar association voted its disapproval. But the state bar approved, and last May 1 (Law Day), the association opened the first of two neighborhood offices, with then Supreme Court Justice Arthur Goldberg on hand to hail "the start of a new process—a process which will expand the rule of law to all segments of the population."

The New Haven association pays Lawyer Charles D. Gill, 27, a salary of $8,000 a year to run his office in a onetime bookie joint next to a pool hall. His clients, mostly Negroes and Puerto Ricans, are carefully screened by 20 Yale law students to determine financial eligibility. The cutoff point: $50 net weekly income per couple, plus $10 per dependent.

For people with incomes below this level, Gill has already handled 396 cases, now averages 80 a week. He has his share of criminal cases, including one now before the U.S. Supreme Court, but his big job is giving the poor new muscle in civil matters. For ex ample, one family of five, in a public-housing project, returned from a weekend trip to find their front door smashed. Officials charged $96 to fix the door, then threatened eviction when the family understandably refused to pay. Gill simply threatened to go to court, and the matter was dropped.