Adapting Without Accepting: The Need for a Long-Term Strategy for

Abstract

A central challenge facing the Equal Justice community is to adapt to the changes of the past two years without becoming reconciled to those changes or the ideological agenda that produced them. To do so, we must restore our institutional capacity to afford poor clients a full spectrum of unrestricted legislative, administrative, and judicial advocacy. That requires the development of a shadow network of organizations that would complement the ongoing work of the Legal Services Corporation (LSC) grantees, by providing services that those grantees can no longer offer their clients. This is a challenge that calls upon our shared vision of a just society. And it is also a challenge that forces us to grapple with the less edifying but inexorable demands of money and funding.