May 30, 2002 | Read Time: 3 minutes
A lawsuit in New York that challenges advocacy restrictions placed on nonprofit providers of legal services to the poor has started to garner attention from charity leaders nationwide. At issue is whether the government can force groups it supports to abide by limits on how they use private aid.
The Council on Foundations has said it will soon file a court brief in favor of overturning regulations that limit the lobbying and advocacy efforts of legal-services groups. Dorothy S. Ridings, the council’s president, this month asked her organization’s 2,000 members to allow their names to be added to the brief as part of an effort to call attention to the implications of the case for grant makers nationwide. Ms. Ridings and others worry that the restrictions placed on the defendant in the case — the Legal Services Corporation and its 200 local offices across the country — by Congress six years ago might apply to other groups and how they use money from private sources.
“The ultimate outcome of this case could determine just how far the government can act in restricting the appropriate use of private funding by all foundations and corporate-giving programs,” Ms. Ridings wrote in the memo.
The case, Dobbins v. Legal Services Corporation, was filed in December by the New York Foundation and David Dobbins, a New York lawyer who provides free representation to the poor through one of the group’s offices there.
Legal Service Corporation’s offices are nonprofit operations, most of which receive both government and private dollars. Because about $300-million in support comes from the federal government, legislators decided during a battle over the organization’s government allocation in 1996 to put limits on what the local offices can do with their money, including the $300-million they receive annually from private donors and state and local governments.
Mr. Dobbins argues that the restrictions infringe upon his right to free speech. He is asking the court to issue an injunction to keep the Legal Services Corporation from enforcing restrictions on its local offices.
The restrictions at issue in the lawsuit do not permit the legal-services offices to perform advocacy work, advertise their services, or represent illegal aliens or prisoners.
Federal laws based on a 1991 abortion-clinic ruling in a U.S. Supreme Court case allow the Legal Services Corporation and other federally supported groups to perform advocacy work only if they set up completely separate facilities with independent staff members.
“Those restrictions are so onerous and expensive that the government is, in effect, restricting free speech,” says John A. Edie, general counsel at the Council on Foundations. “They set a bad precedent that could conceivably lead to limits on the use of private contributions to such groups as the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, the National Endowment for the Arts, and nutrition programs for senior citizens,” he says.
But others contend that restrictions such as those on the Legal Services Corporation are well within the government’s powers, and have been upheld in the past.
“Can Congress decide what they want to subsidize, and can they place restrictions on what they subsidize? The courts have said yes,” says Kenneth F. Boehm, chairman of the National Legal and Policy Center, a conservative government watchdog group, in Falls Church, Va. Mr. Boehm and former U.S. Attorney General Edwin Meese testified in Congress against continued federal support for the Legal Services Corporation in March, arguing that many of the government strictures have not been enforced.
“The government has been attaching strings to its dollars for years. This is nothing new,” says Mr. Boehm.
