Toward a Community-Based Ethic for Legal Services Practice

Abstract

This Article is concerned with legal services lawyers and how they ethically might allocate their time and resources among their clients. Part I of this Article describes the institutional terrain of legal services practice and introduces the concept of the lawyer as street-level bureaucrat, operating within a complex, high demand human services bureaucracy. Part II discusses the problems inherent in attempts to ration care within a subsidized law practice. The purpose of Part II is to reveal the practice tensions that establishment professional ethics fail to accommodate, and that form an underlying justification for a discussion of triage principles. Part III then describes a model of community-based ethics that can serve as the basis for a triage system in a beginning attempt to lessen the internal contradictions of poverty law work.