Another Call For Right To Counsel In Civil Cases

In a recent op-ed piece in the Los Angeles Times, Clare Pastore, a law professor at the USC Gould School of Law and a former legal services lawyer, offers her views on a right to counsel for the indigent in civil cases:

• [E]very day, Americans without access to legal counsel unnecessarily lose homes, jobs, retirement benefits, healthcare and custody of their children. This is because in America, we have not yet recognized a right to counsel in civil cases, except in a tiny number of narrow areas. Indigent clients with the law on their side often find themselves losing to well-funded opponents simply because they have no means of fighting back.

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• Today, it is unthinkable to imagine an indigent criminal defendant having to face trial, conviction and incarceration without a lawyer. Yet that scenario played out in courtrooms across the country until the Supreme Court held in 1963 that criminal defendants have a constitutional right to a lawyer.

• The court ruled in that case, Gideon vs. Wainwright,(1) that "any person hauled into court, who is too poor to hire a lawyer, cannot be assured a fair trial unless counsel is provided for him." Justice is not served, said the court, "if the poor man charged with crime has to face his accusers without a lawyer to assist him." We can no longer afford not to guarantee equal justice to the poor in civil cases as well.

For more, see Rescuing legal aid (As more and more Americans unnecessarily lose homes and jobs to well-funded opponents, it's time we move toward recognizing a right to counsel in civil cases).

(1) 372 U.S. 335, 83 S.Ct. 792, 9 L.Ed.2d 799 (1963). Go here for the Wikipedia post on Gideon v. Wainwright.