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Lawyers' Pro Bono Service and American-Style Civil Legal Assistance

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 January 2024

Rebecca L. Sandefur
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Abstract

Lawyers are often criticized for stinting on their responsibilities for public service; nevertheless, their uncompensated provision of legal services to poor people, or pro bono work, provides a substantial part of available civil legal assistance in the United States. Cross-sectional analysis of data from the late 1990s reveals that reliance on pro bono may render assistance vulnerable to market pressures in ways both obvious and subtle. In states where the legal profession takes in more receipts per lawyer, larger proportions of the profession provide uncompensated service to the poor. In states where the profession feels its work jurisdiction is under threat from unauthorized practice by other occupations, larger proportions of the profession participate in pro bono work than in states where there is no concern about unauthorized practice. As federally subsidized legal assistance shrinks in both scope and scale, growing reliance on pro bono leaves American-style civil legal assistance increasingly vulnerable to market forces.

Type
A Serendipitous Symposium: Two Issues Confronting the Legal Profession
Information
Law & Society Review , Volume 41 , Issue 1 , March 2007 , pp. 79 - 112
Copyright
© 2007 Law and Society Association.

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Footnotes

This project was supported in part by grants from Stanford University's Vice Provost for Undergraduate Education (VPUE). I am grateful to Colin Beck, Curtiss L. Cobb III, Terence Hagans II, Jennifer Lee, Crystal Tindell, and Joseph Weismantel for research assistance. I thank Cheryl M. Zalenski and Clara Carson for responding to inquiries about their studies. Earlier versions of this article were presented at meetings of the Law and Society Association and at the Center for the Study of Law and Society at the University of California-Berkeley, where the author was a visiting scholar during academic year 2005–2006. Richard Abel, Catherine R. Albiston, Scott Cummings, Philip S. C. Lewis, and Jeff Selby, as well as the Editor (Herbert M. Kritzer) and three anonymous reviewers, made particularly helpful comments.

References

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