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79 Yale L.J. 1049 (1969-1970)
Practicing Law for Poor People

handle is hein.journals/ylr79 and id is 1069 raw text is: Practicing Law for Poor People Stephen Wexlert A growing number of young lawyers express an eagerness to work for poor people. They are interested in poverty law because they have a moral concern which speaks against poverty and in favor of legal representation for everyone; because they have a selfish interest in their own life style; and, in many cases, because a stint working for the poor will help them become teachers or avoid the draft. For most of them, working for poor people means making somewhat less money than could be made elsewhere, but that sacrifice is a fair trade for the sense of doing what they view as morally right, and for the lack of pressure that poverty law affords when compared with Wall Street practice. While most of these young lawyers understand that there will be a different tone and style in a poverty practice, they expect their role as a lawyer to be much the same as that of a traditional practitioner. They intend to-and by and large they do-practice law in the traditional model, except with poor people as clients.' Unfortunately, the tradi- tional model of legal practice for private clients is not what poor people need; in many ways, it is exactly what they do not need. Poor people are not just like rich people without money. Poor people do not have legal problems like those of the private plaintiffs and de- fendants in law school casebooks. People who are not poor are like casebook people. In so far as the law is concerned, they lead har- monious and settled private lives; except for their business involve- ments, their lives usually do not demand the skills of a lawyer. Occa- sionally, one of them gets hit by a car, or decides to buy a house, or lets his dog bite someone. The settled and harmonious pattern of life is then either broken or there is a threat that without care it may be broken. This is the law school model of a personal legal problem; law schools train lawyers to take care of such problems and to understand the role of a lawyer in those terms. Poor people get hit by cars too; they get evicted; they have their furniture repossessed; they can't pay their utility bills. But they do not have personal legal problems in the law school way. Nothing that t Staff Attorney, National Welfare Rights Organization. A.B. 1964, Columbia Uni- versity; LL.B. 1967, LLM. 1968, New York University. 1. Jones, Wall Street Goes into the Ghetto, SGNA=mz, Feb. 1970, at 46. 1049

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