Bolstering Legal Services for the Poor

In Joy Moses’s May 7, 2009 column, “Essential Legal Services“, Joy Moses - a policy analyst with the Center for American Progress - highlights the legal challenges poor and lower-income families face in a recession, among these being foreclosure, landlord-tenant disputes, and government assistance eligibility. Unemployment projections due out later this week are expected to be the worst since this recession began in 2007. As such, she argues, the Obama administration and Congress must take appropriate steps to ensure the Legal Services Corporation has adequate funding this year and going forward. State and federal authorities looking to ‘trim the fat’ ought to be chastened by the fact that recessions tend to affect these two groups disproportionately and therefore, cuts to legal programs would merely exacerbate the effects of hard times on the hard-hit.

Read the full article Essential Legal Services