By Gregory H. Williams
On July 20th of this year, the Association of American Law Schools participated in President Clinton?s historic Call to Action to strengthen our nation?s commitment to equal justice and diversity. In a White House ceremony, President Clinton sought a renewal of the Call to Action sounded thirty-six years ago by President John F. Kennedy. As some of you may remember, President Kennedy?s Call to Action took place in the context of resistance to efforts to end racial segregation in this country. While many of the obstacles to equality that existed in 1963 have been overcome, many other obstacles to full racial equality still exist in our nation. Approximately 44% of all African American children and 42% of all Latino children under the age of six live in poverty. Seventy-five percent of Latino students and 70% of African American students in the United States attend predominantly separate minority schools. Rates of residential segregation in many areas are as high today as they were in 1960, and police still target minority drivers in vast disproportion to their representation in our driving population. In the law school world, admissions to public law schools in California and Texas dropped 80% for African-American and 50% for Hispanic students in 1997 following the assault on affirmative action in those states. Despite the growing numbers of minority students in our nation?s law schools over the last twenty-five years, only 2% of the partners in America?s largest law firms are minorities. There is much to be done.
On the occasion of President Clinton?s Call to Action, the AALS was pleased to announce two related initiatives to help achieve the goals of equal justice and diversity. First, we are developing a comprehensive strategic plan to promote diversity that includes immediate, short-term and long-term goals. We pledge to help law schools that face attacks on their diversity efforts. As a result of the Supreme Court ruling in Bakke more than 20 years ago, the number of persons of color has increased in our law schools. We need to continue to support the entrance of minority students into law school and promote and encourage their achievements. We will also help develop alternative methods to provide access to law school for persons of color. We must not lose a generation of prospective law students as we confront opponents of affirmative action and diversity. And, we plan to work with others to develop strategies to reach elementary and middle school students so that we encourage the next generation to begin to think about professional careers at the very beginning of their school years.
Second, as indicated in our new report, Learning to Serve, generated by the efforts of former President Deborah Rhode, the AALS has called upon law schools and individual faculty members to strengthen their commitment to the professional ethic of community service. We are asking all our member schools to provide every law student with the opportunities to volunteer their legal skills in their communities. We believe that through these opportunities more law students will witness first-hand the every day struggles many Americans face with racial and economic injustice, will confront prejudices and misconceptions about persons of diverse backgrounds and will learn the important role that pro bono legal services plays in solving community problems.
I believe that we must also teach our students that as lawyers, they will be leaders. We must give them the education, the skills and the experiences they need to go into communities and to work for racial justice. By inculcating in our students the values of diversity and of lawyers in the service of society, I believe we will ensure that future lawyers devote part of their careers to the pursuit of justice for all Americans. President Clinton thanked the AALS for "pledging to help more schools incorporate community service" into law school curriculums, "so that more law graduates will come out of law school predisposed to do volunteer work and pro bono work." I confess to great pride that our association was peculiarly poised to be able to respond substantively to President Clinton?s initiative and had already begun initiatives on equal justice and diversity well before this special and potentially defining moment for the nation?s legal community.
As we all know, however, it is one thing to announce grand initiatives, and it is quite another to turn those initiatives into tangible results and achievements. Our challenge in the legal community will be to move forward toward concrete actions. I know most of you are as excited as I am about this Call to Action and, like me, are beginning to look for ways in which we can continue to infuse concerns of equal justice and diversity into the daily life of our law schools. We have a huge task before us. Our biggest task and greatest challenge will be to draw our students into this great opportunity for the advancement for our society and for the legal profession. We need to enhance students? willingness to embrace the leadership roles that naturally fall to lawyers in American society. Our dilemma is to how to accomplish this objective of leadership training.
Leadership is often taught best by example; we learn how to lead by observing adept leaders. During my very first semester in college, it made a deep impression on me when I learned that my widely admired and deeply respected history professor also served on the local city council. His service struck me as an exemplary act of a member of the academic community who recognized that he was part of a larger and more encompassing society. When I was in law school, one of my favorite professors drew class hypotheticals from his pro bono representation of low income clients. As I listened to him analyze problems faced by his clients, I recognized that all lawyers could make time to work to increase equality in the justice system on behalf of low-income persons.
These professors inspired me, and I remain convinced that the best way that we, as law faculty, can teach leadership is by providing an example for our students. I believe we can find ways to lead by example without ignoring the demands of scholarship and teaching. In our ranks, we are fortunate to have faculty members who are highly respected scholars and teachers and who, through their public service, significantly enhance the justice system locally, nationally and internationally. I believe that we can do even more. Some may respond that we are already doing a great deal at law schools to work toward equal justice and I agree. Almost every law school has at least a handful of faculty members whose contributions to improving the quality of justice in this nation are significant and important. Working for justice, however, is not the work of a few or a handful; we must have more of our ranks involved in these efforts. Just as I firmly believe that a person cannot be a truly outstanding teacher in the classroom without some continuing and substantial commitment to scholarship, I do not believe that a professor can be truly excellent unless she possess an up-to-date understanding of the current state of the justice system in this country. Gaining that knowledge requires us to do more than read advance sheets and journal articles.
There is a definite national need for the skills we possess. A 1991 ABA study concluded that four out of five low income persons with legal needs had no access to lawyers. That study took into account the contributions of legal services lawyers, pro bono services by lawyers, and even monies donated to legal services by lawyers. All of that combined was not enough to provide more than a piddling amount of legal representation for the nation?s poor. If that situation were not bad enough, Congress has since slashed the federal funding allocated to meet the civil legal needs of the poor. Federal funding for legal services remains 25% lower in actual dollars than it was in the early 1990?s. So things are probably worse. Should we estimate that 9 out of 10 low income persons have no access to lawyers? Or is it 19 out of 20? I believe that it is a fair conclusion to say that most low-income persons in this country lack access to the civil justice system.
The lack of legal representation for those unable to pay for legal help has a very personal meaning for me. Earlier this year, I shared a bit of my own history and background on these pages. Those who have heard my story are most often captivated by the white to black aspect of my life. But there is another aspect of the story, much less unique and much more real for persons from families like mine who, for whatever reasons, find themselves on the bottom of the socio-economic ladder in this country. The disintegration of my family because of divorce and abandonment resulted in my brother and I free-falling from a very privileged existence to living in a tumble down shack with only a single cold water tap with my alcoholic father. Virtually overnight, life became very different for my brother and me than it had been in the years when my father was a successful businessman . But one day, a ray of light entered our lives in the form of a fifty-five year old black neighbor whom we called Miss Dora. She worked as a domestic six days a week, ten hours a day, for $25, which was not a lot of money even in the mid 1950?s. She had virtually nothing. But she saw my brother and me in the corner of that small shack, hungry and tattered, sitting by my father who was lost in a fog of alcohol. She took us into her home, a refuge from the racism and helplessness we faced at that time. She shared all that she had with us, her money, time, and wisdom. Although I did not recognize it then, I saw leadership exhibited by a woman with an eighth grade education.
There were other facts that I did not recognize as my brother and I struggled daily to survive the harsh world of our youth. I did not recognize that a lawyer could have made a difference in my day to day life. As I think about those long ago days, I now realize a lawyer might have helped Miss Dora become our legal guardian. That service would have required only a few hours of a lawyer?s time, but it could have eased a lot of pain in the life of a ten-year-old boy. A legal relationship between us might have opened the door for much needed welfare and other benefits. A legal relationship with her might have required my high school teachers to listen to her when she sought to place me in honors classes. They turned a deaf ear to her, and I had to find my father, sober him up, and drag him to school to make the request. As an adult, I returned to my hometown to look over my school records and saw that officials had noted that I needed glasses, even as an elementary school student. The lack of welfare benefits meant that I was not able to get glasses until adulthood.
As legal educators, we have the opportunity to create leaders, to inspire future lawyers who will be able to make a difference in the lives of low income families, whether it be by volunteering their own time or by supporting the need for resources to provide equal access to justice. Seemingly small contributions of time can have a tremendous impact. A dean sent a letter to the law faculty pointing out the current situation, after cuts in federal funding for legal services. He asked faculty to let him know if they were willing to receive calls with questions from legal services lawyers or would be available on occasion to speak to them about new issues in their field. About half of the faculty responded positively, and their names were sent to legal services lawyers throughout the state. As a result of the letter and response, a substantial portion of the faculty took a leadership role in helping to provide equal access to justice, though rarely involving more than a few hours of time per year. Scholarship and teaching did not suffer. Examples included:
You probably know of other avenues of leadership. I remain convinced that with just a few hours of involvement by deans and faculty members, students will gain valuable leadership lessons. And that example of leadership by the dean and the faculty may ultimately provide an escape from isolation and victimization for some of the children, who are closed out of the legal system by lack of access to lawyers.
President Clinton?s final statement at the Call to Action was a recitation of a quote by Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Dr. King said "the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice." President Clinton continued, "Our nation?s lawyers have bent that arc toward justice. Our nation has been transformed for the better," and he asked America?s lawyers, "to lead us along that arc - from the America we know to the one America we all long to live in." The legal academy has the ability to be and to train the people who will help bend the arc toward justice. We must not shrink from that opportunity.
* This article appeared in the August 1999 AALS Newsletter