The Legal Services Corporation (LSC) is a publicly funded, 501(c)(3) non-profit corporation established by the United States Congress. It seeks to ensure equal access to justice under the law for all Americans by funding organizations providing civil legal aid to those who otherwise would be unable to afford it. LSC was created in 1974 with bipartisan congressional sponsorship and the support of the Nixon administration and is funded through the congressional appropriations process.
LSC has a board of eleven directors, appointed by the president of the United States and confirmed by the United States Senate, that set LSC policy. By law, the board is bipartisan; no more than six members can come from the same party. LSC has a president and other officers who implement policies and oversee the corporation's operations.
By law, LSC's headquarters are located in Washington, D.C. In the 1970s and 1980s, LSC also had regional offices. LSC currently has one office in Washington, D.C. that administers all of LSC's work.
LSC is the largest single funder of civil legal aid in the country, distributing more than 90 percent of its total funding to 132 independent nonprofit legal aid programs. For Fiscal Year 2023, Congress appropriated $560 million to LSC to fund civil legal aid.H.R. 2617, the “Consolidated Appropriations Act, 2023".
History Background LSC is one of the organizational descendants of the former Office of Economic Opportunity (OEO). pp. 96–97. The Economic Opportunity Act of 1964, a key part of President Lyndon B. Johnson's Great Society vision, established the OEO. Building on the work of a 1964 essay, "The War on Poverty: A Civilian Perspective" by Edgar Cahn and Jean Camper Cahn, in 1965 OEO budgeted $1 million per year to create and fund 269 local legal services programs around the country, such as California Rural Legal Assistance, which made a name for themselves suing local officials and sometimes stirring up resentment against their federal funding. Jean Cahn was the first director of the National Legal Services Program in OEO.
By the early 1970s, the Nixon administration began dismantling the OEO; funding for legal services for the poor began to wither, and supporters looked for an alternative arrangement. In 1971 a bipartisan congressional group, including Senators Ted Kennedy, William A. Steiger, and Walter Mondale, proposed a national, independent Legal Services Corporation; at the same time, administration officials such as Attorney General John N. Mitchell and chief domestic advisor John Ehrlichman were proposing their own somewhat similar solution.
Creation and the Ford era The idea behind the LSC was to create a new corporate entity that would be funded by Congress but run independently, with eleven board members to be appointed by the president, subject to Senate confirmation.
LSC was created by the Legal Services Corporation Act of 1974 (). The LSC Act contains certain rules and restrictions regarding what LSC grantees can do. The initial budget was set at $90 million.
Naming and confirmation of the first LSC board was delayed by inaction and opposition, but by July 1975, President Gerald R. Ford had named and the Senate had approved the first board, with Cornell University Law School Dean Roger Conant Cramton as its first chair. South Dakota legal services lawyer and prosecutor Bill Janklow was another member of the initial board. Thomas Ehrlich, at the time the dean of Stanford Law School, became the LSC's first president.
Carter era In December 1977, President Jimmy Carter nominated Hillary Rodham to the board of directors of the LSC, for a term to expire in July 1980. Rodham, an attorney with Rose Law Firm in Little Rock, Arkansas and the wife of Arkansas Attorney General Bill Clinton, had a background in children's law and policy and had worked in providing legal services for the poor while at Yale Law School. She had also done 1976 campaign coordination work for Carter in Indiana.Hillary Rodham Clinton, Living History, Simon & Schuster, 2003, , pp. 77–78. This was a recess appointment, so Rodham took her place on the board without immediate Senate confirmation. Rodham was nominated again in January 1978 as a regular appointment. In mid-1978, the Carter administration chose the thirty-year-old Rodham to become chair of the board, the first woman to become so. The position entailed her traveling monthly from Arkansas to Washington, D.C., for two-day meetings.
During Rodham's Senate confirmation hearings, she subscribed to the philosophy that LSC should seek to reform laws and regulations that it viewed as "unresponsive to the needs of the poor."Brock, Seduction of Hillary Rodham, p. 98. Rodham was successful in getting increases in Congressional funding for LSC, stressing its usual role in providing low-income people with attorneys to assist them in commonplace legal issues and framed its funding as being neither a liberal nor a conservative cause.Brock, Seduction of Hillary Rodham, p. 99–100. By her third year on the LSC board, Rodham had gotten the LSC budget tripled.Brock, Seduction of Hillary Rodham, pp. 104–105. Opposition to LSC during this time came from both Republican Congressman James Sensenbrenner, who favored a "judicare" approach of compensating private lawyers for work done for the poor, and Conservative Caucus head Howard Phillips, who objected to LSC representing gays.
LSC funding was at its highest-ever mark, in inflation adjusted dollars, in fiscal 1980,Carl Bernstein, A Woman in Charge: The Life of Hillary Rodham Clinton, Knopf, . pp. 132–133. with a budget of $303 million. Some 6,200 poverty lawyers filed suits using its funds on behalf of 1.5 million eligible poor clients; the lawyers won almost 80 percent of their cases, which mostly involved divorces, evictions, repossessions, and interrupted payments from federal agencies. For fiscal 1981 it was budgeted at $321 million.
In June 1980, Carter renominated Rodham for another term on the board, to expire in July 1983. Sometime between about April 1980 Rodham is still chair after having given birth "a few weeks ago"; Chelsea Clinton was born on February 27, 1980. and September 1980, pp. 388–403, exact reference p. 398 shows McCalpin as chair in September 1980. F. William McCalpin replaced her as chair of the board. He would remain chair through late 1981.
Reagan era LSC was strongly opposed by some political groups. As Governor of California in the 1960s, Ronald Reagan had advocated elimination of all federal subsidies for free legal services to the poor in civil cases, and had tried to block a grant to California Rural Legal Assistance in 1970. Indeed, Time magazine would state, "Of all the social programs growing out of the Great Society, there is none that Ronald Reagan dislikes more than the Legal Services Corporation." The CRLA's executive director would characterize Reagan's attitude towards the organization as akin to that of Darth Vader.
When President Reagan took office in January 1981, he attempted to eliminate the LSC by zero funding it. Supporters of LSC rallied to defend it; American Bar Association president W. Reece Smith, Jr. led 200 lawyers to Washington to press its case. In response to Reagan's clear intentions against the LSC, the Coalition for Legal Services was formed to lobby outside, but on behalf of the LSC, which showed support via grant recipients.
The U.S. House Judiciary Committee blocked Reagan's zero-funding action in May 1981, but did cut financing to $260 million for both of the next two years as well as place additional restrictions on LSC lawyers. By the following month, the now Republican-controlled U.S. Senate Labor and Human Resources Committee had cut proposed financing to $100 million, as part of what The New York Times deemed an "increasingly bitter ideological struggle". Moreover, Reagan administration officials accused LSC of having "concealed and understated" its lobbying activity and support for politically motivated legislation.
In November 1981, the Reagan administration, although still hoping to eliminate LSC, decided to replace all eleven LSC board members with nominations of their own. In return the LSC began to set up "mirror corporations" to circumvent congressional restrictions and reuse funds for political advocacy. The proposed new chairman was Ronald Zumbrun, president of the ideologically opposite Pacific Legal Foundation, which had previously defended the state of California against several legal aid lawsuits. For fiscal 1982, LSC's budget was reduced by 25 percent to $241 million, with new rules prohibiting most class action suits and lobbying. Zumbrun's nomination was sufficiently controversial that in January 1982, the Reagan administration dropped it, and instead made a recess appointment of William J. Olson to be chair. Olson had headed the Reagan transition team dealing with LSC and had personally recommended its abolition, so LSC advocates were not mollified.
At the same time, the Reagan administration had named six other board members as recess appointments. In February 1982, the Carter-appointed members of the previously existing board filed suit to against the recess appointments, claiming they were unlawful and that they should be enjoined from holding meetings.Brock, Seduction of Hillary Rodham, pp. 110–111. Rodham hired fellow Rose Law Firm associate Vince Foster to represent her in the case and to seek a restraining order against Reagan. The Reagan nominees may have been prohibited from meeting with the Legal Service Corporation before confirmation.
Rodham also prodded Senate Democrats to vote against Reagan's nominees. The nominees did undergo heavy criticism in Congress, with one labeled a bigot and Olson lambasted for his transition position. In March 1982, yet another new chair was named, Indiana University law professor William F. Harvey, although Olson would remain on the board. Harvey and Rodham had a conference call in which Rodham reiterated her desire for the lawsuit. That action, McCalpin v. Dana, was decided in favor of the defendants by summary judgment in October 1982.
By December 1982, the Senate was willing to confirm six of Reagan's more moderate nominees, but not Harvey, Olson, and another; the Reagan administration instead pulled the names of all of them. This board then closed its last meeting in a public debacle, with Olson lambasting LSC as full of "abuses and rampant illegality" and a "waste of the taxpayers' money through the funding of the left," while being harangued by a hostile audience. And too, the Reagan appointees to the board were being criticized for collecting substantially higher fees than previous board members.
In September 1983 the General Accounting Office found that in early 1981, LSC officials and its local affiliates had used federal funds in assembling opposition to Reagan's efforts to eliminate LSC, and that this use had been in violation of the LSC Act's restrictions against such political activity. Such actions against the LSC Act were not crimes, and the GAO report did not claim any crimes had taken place. The investigation had been initiated by the LSC in 1983 ordering a series of "raids" on their own offices to attempt to discover evidence of questionable actions taken by the LSC in 1981, prompting Time magazine to declare LSC "an organization at war with itself."
More recess appointments were made by Reagan in late 1983, in 1984, and in early 1985, with again none of them being confirmed by the Senate. Indeed, LSC's board would go a total of three and a half years populated by recess appointments. Finally in June 1985 the Senate confirmed the latest batch of Reagan nominations. The Carter board lawsuit, since renamed and appealed as McCalpin v. Durant to the United States Court of Appeals, District of Columbia Circuit, was then decided later in June 1985 as moot.
George H. W. Bush era