Deborah Rhode, director of the Stanford Center on Ethics, is Ernest W. McFarland Professor of Law at Stanford University. She made these remarks at an "Ethics at Noon" presentation.
"Equal justice under law" is one of America's most firmly embedded and widely violated legal principles. It is a rhetorical flourish commonly encountered in ceremonial rhetoric and occasionally even constitutional decisions. But it comes nowhere close to describing the justice system in practice. While this is not, of course, the only legal context in which rhetoric outruns reality, it is one of the most disturbing, given the fundamental nature of the rights at issue.
It is a shameful irony that the nation with the most lawyers has among the least adequate systems for legal assistance. It is more shameful still that the inequities attract so little concern. An estimated four-fifths of the legal needs of the poor, and the needs of two to three fifths of middle-income individuals, remain unmet. Over the last two decades, national spending on legal aid has been cut by a third, and increasing restrictions have been placed on the cases and clients that government-funded programs can accept. Entire categories of the "unworthy poor" have been denied assistance, and courts have largely acquiesced in these limitations, as well as in ludicrous limitations on fees for court appointed lawyers in criminal cases.i The case law governing effective assistance of counsel and access to nonlawyer services is a conceptual