Serving the Poor

THE BAR

Lawyers all agree that poor people are entitled to an attorney when they get into trouble. But how to get lawyer and litigant together? Many people do not know of their rights, and the American Bar Association's Canons forbid lawyers to solicit employment.

That dilemma was posed in Washington last week at the first National Conference on Law and Poverty, attended by 500 U.S. jurists and lawyers. President Johnson's anti-poverty administrators suggested that lawyers should step in and help the poverty program by seeing to it that the poor are given a fair shake by everybody from slumlords to loan sharks. Said Attorney General Nicholas Katzenbach: Lawyers' ethical standards "have served us well and will continue to do so, but I cannot believe their purpose is to prevent legal services from being offered to individuals who desperately need them but do not know how to seek them out."

One way to help, some lawyers suggest, would be to establish "clinics" in slum neighborhoods, where volunteer attorneys would offer their services to the people. While the bar is not yet convinced that it ought to rewrite its code of ethics, the A.B.A. did agree that "the poor must not only be educated to their legal rights, but stimulated to assert them."

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