Welcome to Verdict Magazine
Listed below is only a brief synopsis of some of the thousands of insightful articles published in Verdict magazine. To read the full articles, contact NCCLP. You can also join as a member, volunteer, become a subscriber or participate in a myriad of other ways to help advance our cause.
Trial Monitoring, A Tool for Legal Recourse
By Zoë Bourne
October 2021
In 2011 an Ecuadorian Court awarded 30,000 indigenous plaintiffs $9.5 billion against Chevron Oil Company for decades of massive oil contamination of the Ecuadorian Amazon. Chevron’s response was to move its assets out of Ecuador and attack Steven Donziger, the lead Plaintiffs’ attorney, claiming that he had obtained the judgment through fraud. The case against Steven Donziger has sparked global outrage among attorneys, legal organizations, Nobel Prize winners, NGOs and members of the U.S. Congress, among others. This article discusses the Donziger case in the context of trial monitoring: a method to provide transparency and facilitate due process for those at risk of receiving an unfair trial
Combining Legal and Organizing Tactics to Achieve a Goal
By Kathleen M. Paolo, Esq.
January 2016
NCCLP Operations Manager recounts how it has grown from one organization in Sacramento California, dealing with the legal needs of organizing drives of the lowest-paid and least-protected workers in the United States, to a nationwide effort, including a publication of national repute, through its method of combining legal work with organizing on an all-volunteer basis, without government or strings-attached funding, setting precedents in the face of our two-tiered legal system (one for the wealthy and one for everyone else.)
Constitutional Consequences of Cutting Court Budgets
By James L. Kaller, Esq.
July 2013
In the face of budget cuts at all levels of federal and state government, the right to one’s “day in court” is seriously threatened as the government closes courthouses and courtrooms and raises court fees.
Sargent Shriver and the Ordered Quest for Justice
By John A. Girardi, Esq. and Mark K. Shriver
October 2012
Mark Shriver remembers his late father, Sargent Shriver, and his many accomplishments, including his role in founding the federal Legal Services Program. In an interview with NCCLP Board of Directors’ member John Girardi, Esq., Shriver talks about his father’s courage and vision to create the means for the program to bring about systemic change by allowing legal service lawyers to challenge government policy.
Why We All Need CCLP
Bay Area CCLP Board member James L. Kaller takes up the recurring question, “Aren’t the legal needs of low-income workers already being met by local legal aid societies and programs funded by the Legal Services Corporation (LSC)?” He describes the history of government-funded legal services, culminating in a 2006 government finding that 80% of the legal needs of low-income Americans are not being met. He details the limitations Congress has placed on LSC attorneys’ ability to challenge laws or practices shown to be harmful to low-income workers and the poor, ensuring continuance of the status quo of no meaningful recourse for a growing portion of our population. Kaller contrasts the approach CCLP takes to seeking systemic solutions to the problems through independent, community based organizing.
Guardians of Gideon Disarmed and Union Busting in the 90’s
By Michael Z. Letwin, Esq.,
January 2001 and part II April 2001
The Supreme Court’s 1963 decision in Gideon v. Wainwright spawned not only public defenders’ offices throughout the nation but the first union of attorneys. The President of the Association of Legal Aid Attorneys, Local 2325, UAW, presents the over 30-year-history of the struggle of defense attorneys employed by New York City’s Legal Aid Society to organize themselves; describing their goals, their tactics and the opposition they have encountered in their quest to improve both their wages and conditions of work and the fate of their clients. The union struck in 1994. Broken by New York City Mayor Rudoph Giuliani through a combination of union-busting tactics such as threatening blacklisting of the strikers, hiring strike breakers, layoffs and cutting funds, the strike and its aftermath was a blow to the overburdened and underfunded attorneys and the constitutional rights of their clients.
The Crime of Poverty
By Carl C. Holmes, Esq.
July 1999
The author, chosen as Public Defender of the Year by the California Public Defenders’ Association, challenges the bar. Will we continue with our delirium for punishment as we lock more and more of the poor away to labor for pennies an hour, and sacrifice the Constitution to do it, or will we attack poverty itself?