Felice Batlan, Chicago-Kent College of Law- “Pride and Prejudice:” Law, Social Work, and the Imperial Ambitions of Legal Aid, 1911-1939
Felice Batlan, Chicago-Kent College of Law
“Pride and Prejudice:” Law, Social Work, and the Imperial Ambitions of Legal Aid, 1911-1939
Abstract: Through the first decade of the twentieth century, legal aid was deeply associated with women. Women lay lawyers, along with a small cadre of professionally trained women lawyers, staffed legal aid offices and poor women with a variety of legal complaints flocked to them. However, as an emerging group of male legal aid lawyers came to the fore, they sought to create a national association of legal aid societies, expand legal aid societies across the nation, standardize the provision of legal aid services, widely publicize the importance of legal aid, and gain the support of bar associations. In the process, such lawyers emerged as the leaders of legal aid, and women’s visibility as lay lawyers and even professional lawyers declined. Shortly thereafter social work began emerging as a profession, lay lawyers were now deemed social workers, and at least some leaders of legal aid fimly believed that social workers had little or no role in the provision of legal aid. This project, however, was never complete for social workers asserted their own authority over the provision of legal aid. Social workers and their allies also had a vision of the services that a client was entitled to as vastly broader than did legal aid attorneys. Moreover attorneys themselves, in the final throes of professionalization, wanted to assert a monopoly over the provision of legal services which social workers challenged. By the 1920s, when four out of five social workers were women, the leaders of legal aid exhibited a full-fledged panic over its relationship to social work and this panic mapped onto issues of gender, authority, and professionalization. This heated controversy raised issues such as the role of lawyers, what it meant to practice law, what services legal aid should provide, what clients legal aid should serve, and the very nature of law. Although historians of legal aid have long pointed to legal aid societies’ conservative nature, social workers and their critiques of legal aid presented an alternative and potentially more radical version of legal aid. At the same time, this story demonstrates that lawyers never quite had the monopoly over law which they believed that they possessed.
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