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UCLA Chicana/o Latina/o Law Review Title California Rural Legal Assistance (CRLA): Survival of a Poverty Law Practice Permalink https://escholarship.org/uc/item/04m0d3v9 Journal Chicana/o Latina/o Law Review, 1(1) ISSN 1061-8899 Authors Bennett, Michael Reynoso, Cruz Publication Date 1972 DOI 10.5070/C711020861 Peer reviewed eScholarship.org Powered by the California Digital Library University of California CALIFORNIA RURAL LEGAL ASSISTANCE (CRLA): SURVIVAL OF A POVERTY LAW PRACTICE MICHAEL BENNETT* AND CRUZ REYNOSO** I was born and raised in San Antonio, Texas, one of fourteen children. My dad died when I was four years old. My mother raised all of us. I lived in what is commonly known as the barrio where it's 100 percent Mexican-American or Mexicano or Raza or Chicano. Most of the families were migrant families. And the Justices here from Wisconsin and the State of Colorado, I think, are probably aware of the plight of the migrant and the Chicano migrant .... In the small towns of America and the State of California, they had no one to resort to except the lawyer that was representing the Chamber of Commerce or the farmer or the farm corporation, the fellow that would hesitate to take a case because once having taken it, he would lose the business of the commercial people. And so the migrant had no recourse whatever. The only way he knew the courts and the court systems and the lawyers was when he was a defendant in a criminal case, when the police were out there serving him with warrants when he was arrested for minor and petty offenses. And this frustration builds up, and I speak from personal ex- perience when I say this. The frtstration builds, and you have no trust in the judicial system, no trust in the lawyers, no trust in the administration of justice. And CRLA came along and they found out that they could trust in people, that once again they could resort to the courts and not to the streets. @ 1972 by MICHAEL BENNEI-r AND CRuz REYNoso * Administrator, California Rural Legal Assistance, 1966- A.B., Stanford University, 1960; M. Div., Yale University, 1963. ** Executive Director, California Rural Legal Assistance, 1969- ; A.B., Pomona College, 1953; LL.B. Boalt Hall, University of California, 1958. Member, California Bar. Deborah Falkenberg and Georgiann Reiche pro- vided considerable research assistance. Throughout. this article, the authors have used the pronoun forms "we", "our", and "us". It should be understood that such designations do not refer specifically to the authors but variously to CRLA's entire staff, Board of Trustees, local Advisory Committees, Central administrative staff, Counsel for CRLA, or any combination of the aforementioned. On the other hand, nothing in the article necessarily reflects the opinion of any or all these groups. In short, the actors have been many, the perspective is the authors'. CHICANO LAW REVIEW [Vol. 1 : 1 And I think it is a major role that CRLA has played in serving the poor and instilling faith in them and saying, well, this system may work for us. This system could possibly be utilized to serve the poor. And I know that in many areas of California this organization is not known as the California Rural Legal Assistance but as the Chicano Rural Legal Assistance, because it helps the Chicano. And to do away with it I think would be, I don't know, certainly an injus- tice to the poor of the state. Mario Obledo, General Counsel Mexican American Legal Defense and Education Fund, before the Commission on CRLA 1 While providing legal services to California's rural poor, CRLA has been politically attacked from local, state and na- tional levels. What follows is the story of how CRLA has sur- vived its political environment. The first section tells how CRLA acquired public recognition and political support prior to 1970, so that it was able to survive when Governor Ronald Reagan vetoed its 1971 grant from the Office of Economic Op- portunity (OEO). The other four sections provide a more de- tailed account of the 1971 refunding fight with the Reagan and Nixon Administrations. I. A BRIEF POLITICAL HISTORY The Organization,Its Philosophy and Practice CRLA offices began appearing in California's agricultural valleys in August 1966, and by the following January nine were in operation.2 Not only was CRLA the first OEO legal service program to serve rural areas, it was also the first state-wide program. The organizational structure has had definite advan- tages. First, it insulated CRLA staff from local community pressures that might interfere with poor people receiving high quality legal services. Second, state-wide organization provided CRLA's staff sufficient resources to be an effective countervail- ing force against the powerful governmental and corporate or- 1. Office of Economic Opportunity Commission on California Rural Legal Assistance, Inc., "Hearings," Reporter's Transcript [hereinafter cited as Commission Hearings], at 418, 426-27 (April 27, 1971). 2. California Rural Legal Assistance, Inc., received a grant of $1,276,138 on May 24, 1966. An administrative-research office was opened in June in Los Angeles and starting in August, service offices were opened in this order: Madera, Santa Rosa, El Centro, Salinas, Santa Maria, McFarland, Modesto, Gilroy, and Marysville. A legislative office was opened in Sacramento in 1968. The Central administrative-research office was moved to San Francisco in August 1968, and the Santa Rosa office was moved to Healdsburg in September 1971. 1972] CALIFORNIA RURAL LEGAL ASSISTANCE 3 ganizations that often controlled their clients' lives. Third, our structure brought CRLA the public recognition necessary to at- tract top staff and to insure the program's survival. From the beginning, CRLA's staff and Board of Trustees were determined that the program would also be different re- garding its law practice. CRLA was not intended as an exten- sion of traditional legal aid wherein attorneys see as many clients as they can, never go to court except in a defensive posture, rarely use discovery, file appeals, or represent groups. CRLA in- tended to offer its indigent clients the same economic, political and social bargaining power that large private law firms of- fered their affluent clients.3 That meant corporate planning with poverty groups as well as individual divorces, representa- tion before legislative bodies as well as bankruptcies, and con- stitutional litigation as well as claims of exemption.4 Our per- spective was that the problems of the poor result far less from unjust rules than from an inequitable distribution of wealth and power and that the lawyers serving them must focus on building legal institutions which can enhance the power of the poor client to economically and politically cope for himself. 5 In short, our aim was to "develop long-range remedies which [would] assist the poor as a class and not just isolated individuals." We always believed we could do the most for our clients 3. James D. Lorenz, Jr., who drafted CRLA's original grant proposal and was the Program's first Executive Director, envisioned CRLA becoming like the large corporate law firm he worked for prior to CRLA. "Obviously we couldn't duplicate O'Melveny and Myers . but we wanted to come as close as we could." Commission Hearings, supra, note 1 at 118 (April 26, 1971). Ironically, O'Melveny and Myers-Los Angeles' largest law firm-was counsel for many of California's largest agribusinesses. 4. CRLA never established a "law reform" or "test case" unit as did many large legal services programs. We spoke of "impact cases"-simply cases that affect a lot of our clients-and wanted all CRLA attorneys to be involved in some. "Impact cases," as CRLA defined them, meant enforcing existing laws or working with poverty groups to create a cooperative more often than it meant establishing "new law" in court. We believed that such cases might arise from almost any individual client's problem if it was thoroughly and pro- fessionally handled, and that "impact cases" were almost bound to arise if attor- neys maintained regular relationships with poverty groups as private firms do with corporations. 5. California Rural Legal Assistance, Refunding Proposal for 1967, Report to the Office of Economic Opportunity and CRLA Board of Trustees on Opera- tions of California Rural Legal Assistance, May 24, 1966-November 25, 1966, in Support of Application for Refunding (Ls Angeles, Ca., December, 1966), 57 [hereinafter cited as 1967 Refunding Proposal]. 6. California Rural Legal Assistance, Proposal to Aid Farm Workers and Other Poor Persons Residing in the Rural Areas of California, at 36 (Los Ange- les, Ca., March 1966) [hereinafter cited as 1966 Funding Proposal]. See also Lorenz, The Application of Cost-Utility Analysis to the Practice of Law: A Special Case Study of the California Farmworkers, 15 UNIvERsITY oF KANSAS LAW REvIEw 409 (1966-67). CHICANO LAW REVIEW [Vol. 1 : 1 and best provide for CRLA's survival if all our activities were highly professional. We viewed ourselves as an organization try- ing to change established political, economic, and social systems on behalf of our clients, but always according to the systems' own rules. We knew that if CRLA gained the reputation of a highly professional and successful litigation group, that reputa- tion would translate into leverage on behalf of our clients-so a simple letter on CRLA stationery might accomplish what was earlier possible only by taking someone to court. Professional performance would also serve as our first line of defense against political attack. We might survive attacks based on political philosophy, but we could never withstand substantiated charges of fiscal irresponsibility 7 or unprofessional handling of cases.

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