Civil Legal Assistance for Low-Income Persons: Looking Back and Looking Forward

This Article discusses the importance of legal aid and the services it provides to low-income persons. The Article also addresses the need for further change. It advocates for the development of a stronger base of public support at the local level. It also calls for an integrated, comprehensive statewide system to ensure that access is available to all those who need relief

The Future of Legal Services: Legal and Ethical Implications of the LSC Restrictions - Address: Interpretations of LSC Restrictions

The purpose of this talk is to set a framework for the discussions on the four panels. I will begin by discussing what has happened in the 104th Congress, describe what can and cannot be done under the restrictions imposed by that Congress, and then frame the context for the later discussions

Global change effects on plant communities are magnified by time and the number of global change factors imposed

Global change drivers (GCDs) are expected to alter community structure and consequently, the services that ecosystems provide. Yet, few experimental investigations have examined effects of GCDs on plant community structure across multiple ecosystem types, and those that do exist present conflicting patterns. In an unprecedented global synthesis of over 100 experiments that manipulated factors linked to GCDs, we show that herbaceous plant community responses depend on experimental manipulation length and number of factors manipulated. We found that plant communities are fairly resistant to experimentally manipulated GCDs in the short term (<10 y). In contrast, long-term (≥10 y) experiments show increasing community divergence of treatments from control conditions. Surprisingly, these community responses occurred with similar frequency across the GCD types manipulated in our database. However, community responses were more common when 3 or more GCDs were simultaneously manipulated, suggesting the emergence of additive or synergistic effects of multiple drivers, particularly over long time periods. In half of the cases, GCD manipulations caused a difference in community composition without a corresponding species richness difference, indicating that species reordering or replacement is an important mechanism of community responses to GCDs and should be given greater consideration when examining consequences of GCDs for the biodiversity–ecosystem function relationship. Human activities are currently driving unparalleled global changes worldwide. Our analyses provide the most comprehensive evidence to date that these human activities may have widespread impacts on plant community composition globally, which will increase in frequency over time and be greater in areas where communities face multiple GCDs simultaneously

Civil Legal Assistance for Low-Income Persons: Looking Back and Looking Forward

This Article discusses the importance of legal aid and the services it provides to low-income persons. The Article also addresses the need for further change. It advocates for the development of a stronger base of public support at the local level. It also calls for an integrated, comprehensive statewide system to ensure that access is available to all those who need relief

Civil Legal Assistance for the Twenty-First Century: Achieving Equal Justice for All

The system of providing civil legal assistance to our nation\u27s poor is in transition. How it will be structured and organized in the future are not yet clear. Now is the time to reassess the mission, purposes, objectives, and structure of the national civil legal assistance system and determine how it should be changed to achieve equal justice for all