Civil Legal Aid

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Legal Aid is a service created by the government to provide legal representation to people that are unable to afford legal counsel during court proceedings. According to the article Civil Legal Aid, Fairclough stated that beginning in the late 1800s and throughout the early years of the 20th century, the American legal profession expressed its commitment to the concept of free legal assistance for poor people in the form of “legal aid societies and bar association legal aid committees.” Fairclough also stated, since 1964, the United States government has supported its commitment to “equal justice under the law” with federal funding for civil legal assistance to low-income people. Today, the federal appropriation of “$329 million represents…show more content…
The agency’s protection was later on extended to others, and in 1890 it became the Legal Aid Society of New York. In 1888, the Ethical Culture Society of Chicago established the Bureau of Justice, the first agency to offer legal assistance to individuals regardless of nationality, race, or sex(Fairclough, 1998). Other cities and states followed suit, and in the first decades of the twentieth century most major cities had fledgling legal aid…show more content…
Legal services advocates have helped children gain access to health care, education and training, and better living conditions. They have also helped poor mothers obtain child support from absent fathers and have helped welfare recipients obtain childcare, job training, and employment. Farm workers and other low-wage workers improved dangerous and unhealthy working conditions, and obtain the wages to which they are legally entitled. Elderly people was able to maintain their independence. They have helped residents revitalize neighborhoods decimated by crime, joblessness, and poverty, through economic development and micro-enterprise initiatives. Legal services has fundamentally changed the ways in which institutions relate to the poor. It has provided an essential link between government and private programs and their intended beneficiaries. It has functioned to ensure that programs designed to benefit the poor actually do so. Legal services has made the justice system more responsive to the needs of the poor. It has brought tens of thousands of private attorneys into the civil legal assistance system as providers of the
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