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A Win for Legal Services
The Supreme Court handed a major victory this
week to poor people with legal problems, and to the justice
system as a whole. It rejected, by a 5-to-4 vote, a conservative
legal group's challenge to a nationwide program that pools
the interest on short-term bank accounts that lawyers hold
in trust for their clients and uses that money to finance
legal services. If the challenge had prevailed, legal services
organizations across the country would have lost $160 million
a year, or about 15 percent of their already tight budgets.
The lawsuit, by the Washington Legal Foundation,
claimed that the program, called Interest on Lawyers' Trust
Accounts, was an unconstitutional taking of property. But
nothing is taken because the money individual clients would
earn on the short-term accounts would be less than the transaction
costs of retrieving it. Justice Sandra Day O'Connor broke
with the court's conservatives and voted to uphold the program.
Thousands of poor people who get help when they are cheated,
abused by a spouse, denied medical care or evicted owe her
and the other justices in the majority a debt of gratitude.
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