Rationing Legal Services: Can Bioethics Help? My new article forthcoming in the Journal of Legal Analysis

There is a deepening crisis in the funding of legal services in the United States. The House of Representatives has proposed cutting the budget of the Legal Services Corporation (LSC), one of the main funders of legal assistance to America’s poor, to an all time low in inflation-adjusted terms. Other sources of funding, such as Interest on Lawyers Trust Account (IOLTA) are also way down due to low interest rates. More than 135 state and local organizations providing LSC assistance are now in a precarious position. The community was already decimated by the last round of cuts in January 2011, that led to the laying off of 1,226 lawyers and support staff at LSC-funded organizations, and 81,000 fewer low-income Americans receiving aid. This is all occurring at a time of extremely high unemployment and state budget cuts in services supporting low-income people, meaning demand for many of these services is going up.

The deepening crisis in funding of legal services only makes more pressing and manifest a sad reality: There is and always will be persistent scarcity in the availability of both criminal and civil legal assistance. Given this persistent scarcity, this Article will focus on how existing Legal Service Providers (LSPs), both civil and criminal, should ration their services when they cannot help everyone. To illustrate the difficulty these issues involve, consider two types of LSPs, the Public Defender Service and Connecticut Legal Services, that I discuss in greater depth below. Should the Public Defender Service favor offenders under the age of 25 instead of those older than 55? Should other public defenders offices with death eligible offenses favor those facing the death penalty over those facing life sentences? How should Connecticut Legal Services prioritize its civil cases and clients? Should it favor clients with cases better suited for impact litigation over those that fall in the direct service category? Should either institution prioritize those with the most need? Or, should they allocate by lottery?

These are but a small number of the difficult questions faced by those who have to ration legal services. Very little has been said as to what principles should govern the rationing of legal services. This is surprising given that civil and criminal LSPs are often funded through a mixture of government funding and charitable support in such a way that they should be answerable on questions of justice, and because their decisions whether or not to support a client is likely to have significant effects on that person’s life prospects. Thus, it seems as though the rationing decisions of LSPs deserve significant ethical scrutiny.

In my new article Rationing Legal Services, forthcoming in the peer-reviewed Journal of Legal Analysis (and available for free download in draft form now), I seek to remedy this deficit in the existing literature by engaging in a comprehensive analysis of how LSPs should allocate their resources given the reality of persistent scarcity. Luckily, this work does not have to begin at square one. There is a developed literature in bioethics on the allocation of persistently scarce medical goods (such as organs, ICU beds, and vaccine doses) that I use to illuminate the problems facing LSPs and the potential rationing principles they might adopt.

I. Glenn Cohen

I. Glenn Cohen is the James A. Attwood and Leslie Williams Professor of Law at Harvard Law School and current Faculty Director of the Petrie-Flom Center. A member of the inaugural cohort of Petrie-Flom Academic Fellows, Glenn was appointed to the Harvard Law School faculty in 2008. Glenn is one of the world's leading experts on the intersection of bioethics (sometimes also called "medical ethics") and the law, as well as health law. He also teaches civil procedure. From Seoul to Krakow to Vancouver, Glenn has spoken at legal, medical, and industry conferences around the world and his work has appeared in or been covered on PBS, NPR, ABC, CNN, MSNBC, Mother Jones, the New York Times, the New Republic, the Boston Globe, and several other media venues. He was the youngest professor on the faculty at Harvard Law School (tenured or untenured) both when he joined the faculty in 2008 (at age 29) and when he was tenured as a full professor in 2013 (at age 34).

Leave a Reply

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.