Rethinking the Welfare State: The prospects for ... - e-Library

Rethinking the selfare state 82
clinic—is simple, the range of possible schemes is quite extensive. The government can,
for instance, stipulate any number of terms in its contract with its supplier, including:
• the types of cases to be handled (civil litigation by plaintiff or respondent; class-action
lawsuits; landlord/tenant disputes; custody; etc., or any combination thereof)
• whether the contract is to assign a “block” of existing cases or for the supplier to receive
a certain number of new cases
• whether the number of hours to be spent on a given case is capped or unlimited
• whether the firm should be permitted to pursue test cases
• how the firm must prioritize its caseload
• whether the firm can accept cases on contingency
• who is to receive the residuals from litigation where a financial award is involved.
Because of these and other variables, the category of supply-side subsidization models
includes a very broad range of possible and actual delivery schemes.
Community legal clinics
By far the most common model of supply-side subsidization of legal services is that of
the community legal clinic model. Indeed, most states support at least some number of
legal clinics to assist in specialized areas. Under these alternatives, the legal aid plan
issues grants to community legal clinics. The office or clinic and its staff lawyers allocate
legal services to those in need of legal aid according to an internal ranking of priorities.
In virtually every Western state, the legal aid clinic movement has its origins in other
radical political activities in the 1960s. Indeed, most present-day systems of state-funded
legal aid clinics arose around that time as both (1) a government response to a need for
legal services by its poorest citizens initially exposed by radical political groups and their
independent clinics and (2) an effort by the government to gain control over the highly
political “poverty law” movement.
In the United States, for instance, the alliances of concerned jurists forged by the civil
rights movement, the anti-draft movement, and class-action lawsuits on behalf of
consumer and environmental groups gave rise to an “ambitious series of […] programs”
which addressed problems of social injustice with legal approaches and perspectives. 27
Many existing projects, such as those funded by the President’s Committee on Juvenile
Delinquency, began to include the provision of certain essential legal services in their
mandates. 28 The community legal clinic movement in the United States began as a loose
network of privately funded charitable ventures, but, by the 1970s, had quickly evolved
in “the direction of the model of the independent, locally-based, neighbourhood law
office” 29 funded by the Federal Government through the Legal Services Corporation Act,
the model which now prevails.
In the Netherlands in the 1960s, students belonging to the radical socialist movement
opened a series of free legal clinics for working class citizens, notably in Tilburg, one of
that nation’s poorest cities. Through the work of these independent clinics, “unmet legal
need was incontrovertibly exposed,” 30 and the government, concerned that this need was
“being partially met in a piece-meal and haphazard way by such a volatile and
inexperienced section of the community as left-wing law students,” began to issue small
grants to independent “law shops” which specialized in public interest law and agreed to