Everyday Justice: A Legal Aid Story

by Ashley Wiltshire Narrated by Rick Wimberly

Overview

The Legal Aid Society's mission is to advance, defend, and enforce the legal rights of low-income and otherwise vulnerable people in order to secure for them the basic necessities of life. Everyday Justice is an on-the-ground history of the Legal Aid Society of Middle Tennessee and the Cumberlands, the story of how national debates about access to justice have impacted the work of its lawyers, and a warning about why the federally imposed limits on that work must be lifted in order to fulfill the pledge of justice for all.

Those surviving on low incomes often see the legal system as an oppressive force stacked against them. Everyday Justice is about lawyers trying to make the law work for these people. This book traces the development and evolution of legal aid in Middle Tennessee from the late 1960s to the turn of the millennium, as told by Ashley Wiltshire, who worked for the Legal Aid Society of Middle Tennessee and the Cumberlands in all its incarnations for four decades, beginning a year after its inception.

Set in the context of the legal aid movement in the United States-beginning as a part of the social awakening in the post-Civil War era, continuing with volunteer efforts in the first part of the twentieth century, and coming to fruition beginning with the OEO Office of Legal Services grants of the 1960s as part of the War on Poverty-Everyday Justice is a story of Nashville, which levied an extended period of opposition because of prevailing cultural and religious views on race and poverty.

Editorial Reviews

From the Publisher

"Everyone who cares about the current state of inequality in America should read this book. It sets out, step by step, how the civil justice system can be a source of either salvation or doom, depending on whether a person has the legal help she needs to protect her children, home, and livelihood."
—Martha Bergmark, founding executive director of Voices for Civil Justice

"This book represents an important case study for how a local community's institutional responses to civil justice issues have evolved. It also sheds light on the human stories behind several major legal and policy developments affecting low-income people in Tennessee in the last quarter of the twentieth century."
—Spring Miller, assistant dean and Martha Craig Daughtrey Director for Public Interest, Vanderbilt Law School

Product Details

BN ID:	2940159673893
Publisher:	Vanderbilt University Press
Publication date:	06/15/2023
Edition description:	Unabridged

Read an Excerpt

The man in the back of the room stood up and pointed at me, “There he is, boys. I told you this would happen, and there he is . . .”

I had just finished my presentation to the Sumner County Bar Association in its meeting at the Gallatin Country Club, talking about our plan at Legal Services of Nashville to open a legal aid office in their town to serve low-income people in three suburban/rural counties. The man pointing his finger at me, I learned later, was the circuit court judge for that area. Like many lawyers in our state, he was convinced that Legal Services lawyers were a danger to society and to the legal profession. Twelve years earlier, two leaders of the Tennessee Bar Association had written in the association’s quarterly journal that Legal Services was a part of “a headlong plunge into socialism.” The title of their impassioned article was “Et tu, Brute!”

In 1974, three years before my fateful trip to the country club, a committee appointed by the Nashville Bar Association, after a year-long investigation, found that three of us had committed “unprofessional conduct of the worst sort” by representing people with developmental disabilities against the state, which had been warehousing them without recourse in deplorable conditions. The committee recommended that the bar association board reprimand us for our actions and insisted that the board of our organization should “assure that this sort of thing is discontinued.”

As we will see during the progress of our story, each of these venomous confrontations eventually had a positive outcome, emblematic of some of the profound changes that will occur in the bar, as well as in the law and in society, over the course of our time. This is a story about the struggle to establish civil legal aid in one place in the American South, about the early instability of Legal Services of Nashville, and about its evolution into an effective and broadly supported organization that has provided representation to vulnerable people who were, and often still are, disadvantaged by their lack of access to all parts of our legal system. It is a story about the wide variety of civil legal cases we handled for our clients and some of the improvements we were able to obtain through those cases.

The opposition and the backlash that we encountered was not and should not be surprising. Many of our cases challenged societal status quo, racial prejudice, bureaucratic lethargy, and business as usual. They disclosed injustices and called for radical changes. They required thoughtful remedies from courageous judges, responsive legislators, and diligent administrators. And thankfully there is no lack of heroes throughout the story in all three branches of government, judges and other public officials who responded effectively to the plight of our clients.

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