Legal Services Corporation Affirmative Dartmouth 2K9 1
LSC Aff (1/18) 2
LSC Aff (2/18) 3
LSC Aff (3/18) 4
LSC Aff (4/18) 5
LSC Aff (5/18) 6
LSC Aff (6/18) 7
LSC Aff (7/18) 8
LSC Aff (8/18) 9
LSC Aff (9/18) 10
LSC Aff (10/18) 11
LSC Aff (11/18) 12
LSC Aff (12/18) 13
LSC Aff (13/18) 14
LSC Aff (14/18) 15
LSC Aff (15/18) 16
LSC Aff (16/18) 17
LSC Aff (17/18) 18
LSC Aff (18/18) 19
**Env Justice Adv**
Inherency: EJ 20
Class Action Key to EJ 21
**Predatory Lending Adv**
Class Action Key to Prevent Predatory Lending 22
Class Action Key to Prevent Predatory Lending 23
Class Action Key to Prevent Predatory Lending 24
Predatory Lending => Econ collapse 25
Predatory Lending => Econ collapse 26
Predatory Lending => Econ collapse 27
**Justice Gap Adv**
Inherency: First Amendment 28
**Obesity Add-on**
Low-income persons at highest risk 30
Low-income persons at highest risk 31
Class Action Key to Solve Obesity 34
Class Action Key to Change Fast Food Industry 35
Obesity Impact - Causes Economic Collapse 36
Obesity Impact – Kills More than War 37
Obesity Impact – 300,000 a year 38
Class Action Key to Take Down Fast Food 39
Obesity Litigation Spills Over 40
**Welfare Reform Adv**
Inherency: Welfare Reform 41
Inherency: Welfare Reform 42
Inherency: Welfare Reform 44
Class Action Litigation Key for Welfare Reform 45
Class Action Key to Welfare Reform 46
**Misc/Add-Ons**
Restrictions own Immigrants 47
Restrictions own Prisoners 48
Restrictions own Women and Minorities 49
**A2: Bad Args**
A2: States – Can’t Solve 50
A2: States – Can’t Solve – Restriction spillover 51
A2: States – Can’t Solve – Poison Pill 52
A2: States – Perm 53
A2: States – Courts would Pre-empt 54
A2: States – Commerce Clause 55
Politics: Plan = Partisan 56
Politics: Plan = Bipartisan 57
Politics: Plan = Popular with Legal Lobby 58
Politics: Plan = Popular 59
Politics: Conservatives Hate 60
Politics: Win for Obama 61
LSC key to Welfare Reform 62
**Case Extensions**
Inherency: Restrictions Now 63
Inherency: Restrictions Now 64
Inherency: Restrictions Now 65
Inherency: Lack of Lawyers Now 66
Class Action Key: General 67
Class Action Key: General 68
Class Action Key: General 70
Class Action Key: General 71
Class Action Key for the Poor 73
Class Action Key for the Poor 74
Spillover Evidence 76
Courts Key 77
Solvency: Lifting Restrictions Key 79
A2: Spending 80
Disads are Non-Unique 81
**Topicality**
Topicality - Legal Services = Social Services 82
Topicality – Legal Services = Social Services 83
Topicality - Legal Services Corporation = Social Service 84
1
Last printed 0/0/0000 0:00:00 AM
Legal Services Corporation Affirmative Dartmouth 2K9 1
LSC Aff (1/18)
Contention 1: The Status Quo
Restrictions on the Legal Services Corporation deny critical legal services to the most needy
Henderson and Zirkin, President and VP of LCCR, 6/24
(Wade Henderson and Nancy Zirkin, President and Vice President of Leadership conference on civil rights, 2009)
Restrictions on the LSC imposed by Congress are unnecessary and have hampered LSC's ability to deliver legal services to those most vulnerable. Restrictions barring legal aid attorneys from collecting attorneys' fees, prohibiting legal services clients from participating in class action lawsuits, and limiting the use of even non-federal monies – roughly $490 million in private and non-federal loans are tied to federal restrictions - have severely impacted the ability of the LSC to effectively and efficiently deliver legal services to individuals who most need legal assistance.
These restrictions preclude integral structural reform through class action lawsuits
Shepard, North Carolina law student, 2009
(Kris Shepard, edited by David Goldfield, “Rationing Justice”, March 2009)
Legal services attorneys handled 1.7 million CELSQS in 1995, then 1.4 million in 1996, a decrease of nearly 20 percent." As they had after the budget cut of IQBI, local programs in the Deep South adapted to the new fiscal realities by decreasing cases and services and. in some cam. Reaching out for alternative sources of Funding. The Atlanta Legal Aid Society, under the leadership of Steve Gottlieb, became particularly adept at fund- raising among the private bar." In spite of such efforts, retrenchment affected all local programs, and the Cuts proved devastating for programs that relied heavily on LSC funding, such as those in Mississippi and Alabama. More drastic than the budget cuts. however, was the new slate of restrictions on the types of cases poverty lawyers could handle. Conservative opponents finally achieved their long-sought goal of restricting representation to individual clients, rather than groups of low-income Americans, by making it illegal for legal services attorneys to participate in class action lawsuits which had been central to poverty lawyers "law reform" strategies since the 1960s. Other restrictions ended legal services advocacy of many aliens and all prisoners as well as strengthened limitations on lobbying. Furthermore, the same Congress that ended the federal entitlement to welfare made it illegal for poverty lawyers to challenge these reforms? To be sure, legal services lawyers confronted many of the same issues they had for three decades, but the legislative events of the mid-1990s promised to reshape poverty law practice once again .
LSC Aff (2/18)
Thus the plan:
The Supreme Court of the United States should rule in the next available and appropriate test case that restrictions on recipients of Legal Service Corporation funding concerning class action lawsuits and the claiming of attorney’s fees are unconstitutional under the First Amendment.
LSC Aff (3/18)
Contention 2: Environmental Justice
Environmental justice communities lack the necessary legal resources to reject polluting industries
Meagan Elizabeth Tolentino Garland 07; Garland - Attorney, Baker & McKenzie, LLP, San Diego. The author conducted the research and writing for this article in 2005 while a student at Boston College Law School; “Addressing Environmental justice in criminal sentencing process: are environmental justice communities “vulnerable victims” under 3A1.1(B)(1) of the federal sentencing guidelines in the post united states v. booker era?” Albany Law Environmental Outlook Journal, http://www.lexisnexis.com/us/lnacademic/results/docview/docview.do?docLinkInd=true&risb=21_T7006030731&format=GNBFI&sort=RELEVANCE&startDocNo=1&resultsUrlKey=29_T7006030734&cisb=22_T7006030733&treeMax=true&treeWidth=0&csi=221806&docNo=10
Courts have looked to the victim(s)' level of sophistication (e.g., legal, financial, political resources available to them when dealing with the defendant) to assess requisite vulnerability. n230 In United States v. Esterman, the court rejected the prosecution's claim that the victim's limited command of English rendered him [*39] unsophisticated and therefore vulnerable. n231 The court found that the victim had a plethora of resources available to him despite his inability to speak English. n232 In fact, the court concluded that the victim, "upon learning that Esterman was siphoning funds ... , had no trouble promptly dispatching a deputy and exploring a variety of self-help options for a full three months before turning to the police and the courts." n233 The court further reasoned that true vulnerable victims do not have henchmen at their beck and call; they do not persuade those who have defrauded them to sign promissory notes; nor do they flout the possibility of contract-killings with third parties, and then file police and civil complaints when payments on the note are not made. n234 Conversely, a jury hearing a case involving a victimized EJ community could consider the fact that most EJ communities do not have the legal or political resources available to pose a "credible threat" much less "take political or legal action" as mentioned in the survey of 200 corporate officials. n235 Further, a court could reason that "without ... technical or political sophistication ... poor and minority communities are more attractive as sites [for LULUs and hazardous wastes facilities] than white and affluent communities." n236 In fact, it is settled that many EJ communities do "not have sufficient resources to pay for the scientific expertise necessary to realizing the potential presented by environmental laws [and] ... [do] not have sufficient legal resources necessary to realizing the potential presented by environmental laws." n237 Consequently, meaningful community involvement in matters involving polluters is not a reality in many EJ communities. n238 In other cases, courts looked to the victim(s)' lack of knowledge in a particular area (e.g., finance) and determined that an "overwhelming" lack of sophistication in a particular area may contribute to the victim's vulnerability. n239 Similarly, because of [*40] the lack of legal sophistication or access to legal counsel, many EJ communities lack the force to reject LULUs and polluting industries in their communities as a result of the NIMBY phenomenon. n240 Moreover, the fact that most hazardous waste facilities and LULUs are pushed out of communities inhabited by the general population and into EJ communities is evidence that the general population, unlike many EJ communities, have more resources to avoid these offenses. n241 Accordingly, many EJ communities neither have the "self-help" options available, nor the "henchmen at their beck and call" to mount a strong defense against potential polluters. n242 As Jeffery Cluett points out in his article, Two Sides of the Same Coin: Hazardous Waste Siting on Indian Reservations and in Minority Communities: Political and economic resources are inextricably intertwined with environmental activism and the ability to get results. "Those ... who have greater access, who know how to tweak their Congress-people to do something, are more likely to get the attention of very busy people. And the people with greater know-how are generally those with greater political and economic resources... . ' n243 A jury and judge could likely be persuaded that EJ communities facing issues of historic non-inclusion and lack of meaningful involvement in important decision making processes are precisely the vulnerable victims section 3A1.1(b)(1) protects. n244 In fact, according to the court in United States v. Parolin, the ""vulnerable victim' sentencing enhancement is intended to reflect the fact that some potential crime victims have a lower than average ability to protect themselves from the [*41] criminal."
LSC Aff (4/18)
And, lack of environmental justice is akin to environmental racism and ensures global ecological collapse and the total destruction of humanity.
Bunyan Bryant, Professor in the School of Natural Resources and Environment, and an adjunct professor in the Center for Afro-American and African Studies at the University of Michigan, 1995, Environmental Justice: Issues, Policies, and Solutions, p. 209-212
Although the post-World War II economy was designed when environmental consideration was not a problem, today this is no longer the case; we must be concerned enough about environmental protection to make it a part of our economic design. Today, temporal and spatial relations of pollution have drastically changed within the last 100 years or so. A hundred years ago we polluted a small spatial area and it took the earth a short time to heal itself. Today we pollute large areas of the earth – as evidenced by the international problems of acid rain, the depletion of the ozone layer, global warming, nuclear meltdowns, and the difficulties in the safe storage of spent fuels from nuclear power plants. Perhaps we have embarked upon an era of pollution so toxic and persistent that it will take the earth in some areas thousands of years to heal itself. To curtail environmental pollutants, we must build new institutions to prevent widespread destruction from pollutants that know no geopolitical boundaries. We need to do this because pollutants are not respectful of international boundaries; it does little good if one country practices sound environmental protection while its neighbors fail to do so. Countries of the world are intricately linked together in ways not clear 50 years ago; they find themselves victims of environmental destruction even though the causes of that destruction originated in another part of the world. Acid rain, global warming, depletion of the ozone layer, nuclear accidents like the one at Chernobyl, make all countries vulnerable to environmental destruction. The cooperative relations forged after World War II are now obsolete. New cooperative relations need to be agreed upon – cooperative relations that show that pollution prevention and species preservation are inseparably linked to economic development and survival of planet earth. Economic development is linked to pollution prevention even though the market fails to include the true cost of pollution in its pricing of products and services; it fails to place a value on the destruction of plant and animal species. To date, most industrialized nations, the high polluters, have had an incentive to pollute because they did not incur the cost of producing goods and services in a nonpolluting manner. The world will have to pay for the true cost of production and to practice prudent stewardship of our natural resources if we are to sustain ourselves on this planet. We cannot expect Third World countries to participate in debt-for-nature swaps as a means for saving the rainforest or as a means for the reduction of greenhouse gases, while a considerable amount of such gases come from industrial nations and from fossil fuel consumption. Like disease, population growth is politically, economically, and structurally determined. Due to inadequate income maintenance programs and social security, families in developing countries are more apt to have large families not only to ensure the survival of children within the first five years, but to work the fields and care for the elderly. As development increases, so do education, health, and birth control. In his chapter, Buttel states that ecological development and substantial debt forgiveness would be more significant in alleviating Third World environmental degradation (or population problems) than ratification of any UNCED biodiversity or forest conventions. Because population control programs fail to address the structural characteristics of poverty, such programs for developing countries have been for the most part dismal failures. Growth and development along ecological lines have a better chance of controlling population growth in developing countries than the best population control programs to date. Although population control is important, we often focus a considerable amount of our attention on population problems of developing countries. Yet there are more people per square mile in Western Europe than in most developing countries. “During his/her lifetime an American child causes 35 times the environmental damage of an Indian child and 280 times that of a Haitian child (Boggs, 1993: 1). The addiction to consumerism of highly industrialized countries has to be seen as a major culprit, and thus must be balanced against the benefits of population control in Third World countries. Worldwide environmental protection is only one part of the complex problems we face today. We cannot ignore world poverty; it is intricately linked to environmental protection. If this is the case, then how do we deal with world poverty? How do we bring about lasting peace in the world? Clearly we can no longer afford a South Africa as it was once organized, or ethnic cleansing by Serbian nationalists. These types of conflicts bankrupt us morally and destroy our connectedness with one another as a world community. Yet, we may be headed on a course where the politically induced famine, poverty, and chaos of Somalia today will become commonplace and world peace more difficult, particularly if the European Common Market, Japan, and the United States trade primarily among themselves, leaving Third World countries to fend for themselves. Growing poverty will lead only to more world disequilibrium to wars and famine – as countries become more aggressive and cross international borders for resources to ward off widespread hunger and rampant unemployment. To tackle these problems requires