A Conversation with John G. Levi of the Legal Services Corporation

A Conversation with John G. Levi of the Legal Services Corporation

By Lucy Ritzmann

When asked to visualize the justice system, I imagine many would conjure images of dramatic murder trials, handcuffs or scenes from Law and Order SVU. And they wouldn’t be wrong — criminal justice is a crucial part of the justice system. However, civil justice, an equally essential facet of the justice system, goes woefully forgotten in this country by many people who may be owed justice. Most people know if a criminal act has been committed against them and even if they choose not to take action, they know the ways in which they can. However, as John Levi, chairman of the Legal Services Corporation, pointed out during our conversation, knowing that your civil legal rights have been violated is a much more nuanced issue. This is something I can attest to: my roommates and I have been having trouble with landlords who were making a somewhat egregious demand of us. After my conversation with Mr. Levi, I started researching and realized that what they were asking actually violated Illinois State Code. After I mentioned that to the landlords, the demand was very quickly dropped. It was a wake-up call: I thought that because I am a student of law surrounded by friends and mentors who also study the law, I would never be in a situation in which I was completely unaware that my rights were being violated. And yet, that was the case, just as it is the case for so many Americans, many of whom experience far more significant violations of their legal rights and have no resources to handle them. This is why the work that John Levi and Legal Services Corporation do is so important.

I first asked Mr. Levi exactly what the Legal Services Corporation is and what they do for the public. He explained that the Legal Services Corporation, or LSC, provides “grants to programs across the country to help people with their civil legal needs so that low-income Americans can have assistance with their civil legal needs.” Descended from Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society vision, the Legal Services Corporation was created by the Legal Services Corporation Act of 1974 during the Ford administration. Today, they have a grant of $410 million which they disseminate to civil legal services across the country. LSC is the largest funder of civil legal services; grantees compete for funding and once granted, LSC assumes oversight to ensure that the funds are going towards legal resources for underserved people. For each grantee, LSC provides 35% to 80% of their total funding. Mr. Levi explained that there are limits to what LSC can be involved in: “no class actions, not immigration, no abortion, no drugs or things like that—we are strictly helping folks with family law issues like domestic violence or getting an order of protection, housing issues, [and] eviction.” He added that they also work with veterans and address elder abuse and financial issues. He noted that most recently, as a product of the opioid epidemic, LSC has seen a huge increase in family members attempting to gain guardianship over minors whose parents or guardians may be addicted. Despite all the work and funds that LSC dedicates towards these issues, Mr. Levi notes that LSC probably needs about $880 million to serve the needs of all the people who seek their help and that as a result, “people are getting left out.”

The Legal Service Corporation is quite unique in its operational structure. A year after joining the board through “presidential nomination and Senate confirmation,” Mr. Levi was elected as chairman. He was then re-nominated and confirmed by the Senate a few years later. While the LSC is a federally chartered 501(c)(3) organization and cannot receive private funding, any organizations sponsored by them are able to receive private funding. Although political climate does have an impact on the LSC—the “President’s party chooses six” of the eleven board positions and the party out of power chooses the remaining five— the LSC is an apolitical organization. A board member’s term is three years, although, given the complexity of the nomination process, many people’s terms last four to five years. Mr. Levi sees this as “a benefit as it is a complicated structure and a complex set of issues.” The current board has served for eight years and is actually only comprised of nine members, as two have left over the course of their terms. Mr. Levi stressed that “even though the board is a bipartisan selection process, the board acts like any other non-for-profit in a non-partisan way.” 

Still, I was curious to know if the Trump Administration had affected the Legal Services Corporation, especially since Mr. Levi and I spoke shortly after the partial government shutdown ended. Mr. Levi explained that although the shutdown had certainly been an issue for the budget office, the Legal Services Corporation submits its budget directly to Congress, where it has had “strong bipartisan support from both sides for many years.” However, the partial shutdown did cause some panic: “at that junction, we only had full funding for our grantees through the third week of February, so we were starting to get quite concerned.” As it stood when Mr. Levi and I spoke, LSC had funding through the third week of April. When asked what they would do if funding from the government stopped, Mr. Levi replied that LSC would try to take out a loan and said, “I hope that does not come to pass because some of our grantees get 85% of their funding from us – you can imagine what that would mean.” He added that because their grantees are not federal employees, it would be illegal to ask them to work without pay.

In addition to this issue, I asked Mr. Levi what the greatest challenge in the realm of civil justice was and how we could address it. He finds that the biggest issue is “leaving this many people out of our justice system – having them look from the outside and having them not even understand how to protect their own rights.” He furthered, “we commissioned a study that was done by the National Opinion Research Center that was published a year and a half ago – it suggests that 86% of the civil legal needs of low-income folks…got inadequate or no appropriate legal assistance during 2017.” He noted that grantees have to turn away up to two-thirds of people seeking help due to lack of staff and that this puts them in a terrible position in which they have to make difficult choices, like prioritizing people with children who need an order of protection over people without children. Mr. Levi noted that in addition to all the people who seek help, there are those who need it who do not even know it: “many people don’t even know their issue is a legal issue.”

In regard to a solution, Mr. Levi noted the need for “a combination of things to address this – one would certainly be more funding, and another is that we need reform;” specifically, he noted the need for housing reform. Mr. Levi also called for structural reform by creating more levels of staff and assistance for people: “in the medical profession, we have nurses and physician’s assistants – we need to have more paraprofessionals who are able to handle these kinds of matters.” Moreover, the legal process is time-consuming and complex, which is especially limiting for those who work in jobs that will not accommodate them. Mr. Levi is working to combat this by making the system more accessible by implementing a program across the country that trains librarians to assist people with finding solutions to their civil legal problems.

Mr. Levi has had a distinguished career both as a partner at Sidley Austin LLC and as chairman of the board of the Legal Services Corporation for nearly a decade and he continues working to make the American justice system more equitable. The work that he and the Legal Services Corporation do for Americans is essential and I am excited to see the changes that their reforms will affect. Mr. Levi is also excited for the future — he concluded our conversation with a message of encouragement: “Look for great things from your generation of lawyers.” 

Lucy Ritzmann is a second-year in the College pursuing a double major in Law, Letters, & Society and Political Science.