Rationing Justice

Poverty Lawyers and Poor People in the Deep South

Kris Shepard

• Publisher: LSU Press
• Year: 2007
• ISBN:
  9780807149027
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: North American History
• Index: History

Established in 1964, the federal Legal Services Program (later, Corporation) served a vast group of Americans desperately in need of legal counsel: the poor. In Rationing Justice, Kris Shepard looks at this pioneering program's effect on the Deep South, as the poor made tangible gains in cases involving federal, state, and local social programs, low-income housing, consumer rights, domestic relations, and civil rights.
While poverty lawyers, Shepard reveals, did not by themselves create a legal revolution in the South, they did force southern politicians, policy makers, businessmen, and law enforcement officials to recognize that they could not ignore the legal rights of low-income citizens. Having survived for four decades, America's legal services program has adapted to ever-changing political realities, including slashed budgets and severe restrictions on poverty law practice adopted by the Republican-led Congress of the mid-1990s. With its account of the relationship between poverty lawyers and their clients, and their interaction with legal, political, and social structures, Rationing Justice speaks poignantly to the possibility of justice for all in America.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Prologue: Law is fine if you get on the good side of it
• 1: A “NEW BREED OF LAWYER”
• 2: THE LAWYERS’ WAR ON POVERTY, 1965–1970
• 3: THE LEAN YEARS, 1970–1975
• 4: “EQUAL ACCESS TO JUSTICE”
• 5: LOW-INCOME FAMILIES, POVERTY LAWYERS, AND THE REGULATORY STATE
• 6: LOW-INCOME COMMUNITIES, POVERTY LAWYERS, AND RACIAL RECONSTRUCTION
• 7: POVERTY LAW, POLITICS, AND THE RATIONING OF JUSTICE, 1981–1996
• Appendix: Political Support for the Legal Services Corporation
• Abbreviations
• Notes
• Selected Bibliography
• Index