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.

DOES THE FIRST AMENDMENT APPLY TO SOCIAL MEDIA OUTLETS LIKE TWITTER, FACEBOOK, ETC.?

DOES THE FIRST AMENDMENT APPLY TO SOCIAL MEDIA OUTLETS LIKE TWITTER, FACEBOOK, ETC.?

By Manning Farnsworth Snyder

The extent of the First Amendment has been a popular topic in the news recently, specifically regarding social media outlets like Facebook and Twitter. As social media platforms and usership continue to grow, so has the extent to which free speech applies to them. In understanding how the First Amendment applies to these organizations, one must look at precedent, albeit limited, and how the independent organizations confront arising conflicts.

In 2017, Packingham v. North Carolina was argued in the Supreme Court. The case involved a convicted sex-offender from North Carolina, Lester Packingham, who was arrested for using Facebook to post about a traffic court experience in 2010. A North Carolina state law exists prohibiting sex offenders from using social media. Packingham was a landmark case in defining the realm of free speech for social media platforms. The court unanimously ruled the North Carolina statute unconstitutional, and the case is quite significant as it is one of the first cases to address the relationship between the First Amendment and social media sites.

Furthermore, there is not a lot of precedent to reference regarding social media free speech regulations. Even when looking at other prominent historical First Amendment Supreme Court cases before 1990, such as  Whitney v. California or Tinker v. Des Moines Independent Community School District, none involve the Internet or social media simply because the Internet was not invented yet. Cases that do involve the Internet such as Reno v. American Civil Liberties Union or United States et. al v. American Library Association have established precedent for how the First Amendment applies to the Internet, but not specifically how it applies to social media. The last Supreme Court case involving social media and the First Amendment before Packingham came in 2015 with Elonis v. United States, which addressed the First Amendment, but the majority decision did not rule on First Amendment matters. The Packingham v. North Carolina case brief stated that “the Internet’s forces and directions are so new, so protean, and so far reaching that courts must be conscious that what they say today may be obsolete tomorrow.” Additionally, there is some precedent in lower courts regarding social media and free speech, such as Bell v. Itawamba County School Board, a case in the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals that ruled that public schools can punish a student for using Facebook and Youtube as a platform for posting song lyrics that referenced an alleged sexually relationship between two teachers and female students. The case, while useful in understanding public schools’ role in matters of social media, is not helpful in determining to what extent the First Amendment applies to social media outlets.

Many people are under the impression that the First Amendment allows them to say or “post” whatever they want, regardless of the extremity or the vigor of the opinion. Recently, Facebook removed the Alex Jones “Infowars”  far-right podcast citing a violation in the company’s social networks policy against hate speech. Youtube, Spotify, and LinkedIn, among others, followed suit in removing Jones and other “far-right sites”. The move caused somewhat of an uproar among some Republicans, notably Ted Cruz, who said that Facebook has become an “arbiter of free speech”. As Facebook and Twitter are private businesses, they individually have the power to determine their policy regarding hate speech, obscene language, and harassment, but also what is considered a violation of such policy—all without the interjection of a third-party. Facebook bans hate speech, yet allows for humor, satire, or social commentary related to these topics;” Twitter bans “excessively violent images in profiles and headers.”

In October 2018, the Supreme Court announced they will hear a case entitled Manhattan Community Access Corp. v. Halleck that will define what a public forum is and will address the issue of: “under what circumstances can a private entity… be deemed a state actor subject to claims under the First Amendment?” The oral argument will be heard in late February, and the decision could clarify many lingering questions regarding the First Amendment and how they coincide with private technology companies.

The Packingham opinion noted the importance of social media and websites to a private citizen: “Websites can provide perhaps the most powerful mechanisms available to a private citizen to make his or her voice heard.”  With no finite definition or statute to the range of the First Amendment in regards to social media, is it acceptable for people to assume that free speech does not extend to social media?

Manning Farnsworth Snyder is a first-year at New York University, studying journalism and sociology.