“Nothing rankles more in the human heart than the feeling of injustice.”
American lawyers have devised a system of substantive law and legal procedure so convoluted that it denies access to justice to anyone who didn’t have a lawyer to navigate it.
This system could be fixed immediately by greatly multiplying the number of legal-aid societies specialized in trusts and senior law.
The ability for any Senior to invoke the full protections of the law, realistically, are only as good as ones self help ability to discern if proper proceedings where followed and if the court (especially probate) recognized those improper invasions of elder rights law, by whomsoever attempted to do otherwise, violated that seniors freedom and equality - destined to vanish into nothingness.
Needing a lawyer and not having one are not well documented at all.
EARLY THIS YEAR, almost 20 percent of Americans lived in families with household income low enough to make them eligible for legal aid paid for by the federal government.
The threshold is at or below 125 percent of the federal poverty level ($30,750 for a family of four this year). Of these 60 million or so people, around seven out of 10—more than 40 million—were in households that had faced a civil legal problem the previous year.
Most say the problem “severely” or “very much” upset their lives: they lost disability benefits, could no longer afford essential medical care, fell behind on rent and were evicted.
Despite the high incidence of these problems and their often-devastating consequences, in nearly nine out of every 10 instances, the people involved lacked the help of a lawyer, leaving them at the mercy of courts and other government agencies with byzantine rules, insufficient resources, and short supplies of mercy. That’s the basic measure of the “Justice Gap,” as a recent report by the Legal Services Corporation calls it—the difference between low-income Americans’ need for legal help in dealing with calamitous matters and the resources available to provide it.
BOTH the House and the Senate recommendations maintain dozens of restrictions on how LSC can spend its money. Legal-aid organizations receiving LSC grants can’t take part in class-action lawsuits; they can’t get involved in litigation or other activities about immigration, abortion, assisted suicide, desegregation of public schools, or civil rights of prisoners, LSC itself, or (with narrow caveats) criminal cases. They can’t engage in legislative or regulatory lobbying, political activities like voter registration and promoting ballot measures like referendums, or welfare reform. They can’t engage in or encourage public demonstrations, picketing, boycotts, or strikes.
The restrictions are meant to keep legal-aid organizations focused on solving legal problems for individuals. More to the point, they are meant to keep them from engaging in collective action to reform laws and public policies, from representing large groups of people in lawsuits challenging government agencies or major corporations, and from taking sides in disputes about the most divisive social issues. They are intended to safeguard the status quo.
Further restrictions follow a formula when making grants: each state receives its share of funding based on its share of the American population in households with income at or below 125 percent of the federal poverty line for households of that size, from one person ($15,075)
to eight ($51,650), with each additional member allowed a modicum of extra income ($5,225).
In fiscal year 2015, 93 percent of total spending was on formula-based grants to legal-services organizations everywhere, with the most ($43 million) going to California and the least ($0.5 million) to Vermont.
The bipartisan backing in Congress is a product of all of these restrictions, which reflect a history filled with controversy. A national Legal Services Program was part of the Office of Economic Opportunity during President Lyndon Johnson’s War on Poverty in the mid 1960s. Although only a small fraction of the initial funds went to legal services, the new program greatly increased the country’s support of legal aid for the poor.
Earl Johnson Jr., then the program’s director and later a judge on California’s Court of Appeals, reported in 1968 that it had funded “250 locally-operated programs in forty-eight states” which had “set up 850 Neighborhood Law Offices” and hired “more than 1,800 full-time attorneys”—“almost as many lawyers” as were “employed by the United States Department of Justice and all of the United States Attorneys Offices around the nation.”
Those lawyers provided legal aid to the poor while seeking to reform law that penalized people for being poor. During the almost century that some form of legal aid had existed in the United States before the Legal Services Program, the Supreme Court heard one case brought by a legal-aid lawyer. Between 1965 and 1974, legal-services lawyers became the voice of the poor at the Court. It accepted 64 percent of the cases the lawyers asked them to, a remarkably high rate. Of the 110 cases considered, those lawyers won 62 percent, with conservative justices supporting those victories as fully as the liberals. Legal-services lawyers developed a new field of poverty law while obtaining justice.
The opposing view?
Ignorance, basically, about the value of evidence-based research.
Very few in the American bar or on the bench believe in rigorous evaluation of civil legal services or court techniques—but “just because we have been doing something one way for a long time doesn’t mean it’s the best way to address any particular problem.”
The main premise behind all American Justice is to stand under God, figure out what works, do it, then rigorously test it before God.
"We The People", starting today, must set all Discernment standards as goals in demand of the United States to close all of it's ungodly gaps completely by 2026 - in no exception.
United under God must transform all legal and political problems into moral ones before any generation can honorably claim it helped to close that nations ungodly gaps.
United under God must transform legal and political problems into moral ones before any generation can honorably claim it helped to close ungodly gaps.
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