Class Action

Harvard Law School alumni join fight for social justice at growing network of volunteer legal centers

Seven years ago, the consumer advocate Ralph Nader met for sandwiches and coffee with some of his colleagues from Harvard Law School’s Class of 1958 and pitched

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Appleseed Foundation

one of his favorite themes: Lawyers have a responsibility to serve society beyond representing the interests of their fee-paying clients.

That meeting sowed the seeds for what has become a network of 16 non-profit law centers around the country. Known as Appleseed centers, the organizations persuade lawyers to give their time, money, and expertise to projects that improve living conditions for infants, public-school children, poor people, and others.

The centers — and their supporting national organization, the Appleseed Foundation — take their name from Johnny Appleseed, who, legend says, traveled from town to town throughout the Midwest spreading apple seeds.

Like the apple orchards in that legend, the network started by Mr. Nader and several other Harvard Law School graduates continues to expand. Affiliates in Indiana and North Carolina are being set up, and a recent $300,000 foundation grant — Appleseed Foundation’s largest ever — is helping to pay for additional centers in the South and Great Plains states. Lawyers from Canada, Mexico, India, and other countries have recently expressed interest in setting up centers as well.

Mr. Nader and his Harvard classmates hope the group’s success will inspire other law-school alumni to take on public-service projects of their own.

Mr. Nader has long believed that college ties can be a good way to get people involved in non-profit work. Before starting Appleseed, Mr. Nader helped create the Princeton Project 55 at his undergraduate alma mater. As a result, members of the Princeton Class of 1955 have undertaken several community-service projects, such as becoming mentors to students and working to fight the spread of tuberculosis. The Princeton organization has just created an Alumni Network to try to get other colleges and universities to follow suit.

Mr. Nader says he hopes Appleseed will inspire all lawyers to begin thinking about their obligation to spend some time on “the building of institutions for the advancement of justice.”

The Appleseed centers use a combination of lawsuits, lobbying, mediation, and research to solve local problems. Although each center’s board of directors is free to choose its own issues, the centers must take on causes that affect many people, such as reforming public-school financing or insuring legal representation for immigrant workers.

That approach, says Mr. Nader, is “much more efficient and much more fundamental and longer lasting” than the traditional donated legal help that many lawyers offer to individuals.

In Florida, for example, an Appleseed group is suing the state to force the government to improve its public schools, where nearly half the students fail to meet minimum standards of achievement. In Illinois, where courts had wrongly placed 12 people on death row since 1977, the center has been pressuring the state to examine the way its death-penalty law is being applied.

Along with its state affiliates, the national office of Appleseed has also created a project at Harvard Law School and American University, in Washington, that is working to improve the nation’s system of electing government leaders. The participating lawyers, law-school students, and academics are concentrating on issues such as campaign-finance changes and ballot access for independent and third-party candidates.

Those initiatives can all be traced back to the 35th reunion of Harvard Law School’s Class of 1958. At that meeting, the former classmates agreed to take up the challenge issued by Mr. Nader and others to start Appleseed.

Philip F. Zeidman, an Appleseed co-founder who was a special assistant to former Vice-President Hubert Humphrey, says his classmates liked the idea of having an organized way to donate their time and legal skills to help society.

“If you’ve been engaged in corporate and professional law in a large firm — which is, after all, more characteristic of Harvard Law School graduates — there are just not many opportunities for this,” says Mr. Zeidman, a partner in the Washington office of Rudnick & Wolfe, a Chicago law firm.

The Nebraska center was created in 1996 by four Harvard Law School graduates, including former Republican Gov. Robert Crosby, who felt that such a center was especially needed after Congress made deep cuts in federal money for the Legal Services Corporation, which provides funds to help the poor get legal aid.

As a volunteer with the Nebraska center, Gregory C. Lauby has been pushing for the reduction of toxic emissions from the state’s meatpacking industry. Mr. Lauby, a lawyer who runs his own practice in Lexington, Neb., was assisted by a major New York law firm that donated its time through the Appleseed Foundation.

After numerous court and regulatory battles, the state finally adopted new standards for emissions of hydrogen sulfide, which, in sufficient levels, can be toxic.

Linda M. Modlin, a local councilwoman who lives less than a mile from one of the plants, says residents could not have obtained the new rules without the help of Appleseed and the lawyers who contributed their time. Many of those most affected by the emissions are low-income Mexican immigrants, while the company that owns the local plant is IBP, a Fortune 500 business.

“We never would have been able to afford an attorney who could have done battle with someone like them,” says Ms. Modlin, who began her fight against the plant in 1991.

The Nebraska center is still working to insure that the state enforces the new regulations.

Its executive director, Milo Mumgaard, says the case is a good example of the kind of systemic changes that Appleseed seeks. “You had active, community people who knew what they wanted to have done,” he says. “But they needed lawyers to help them get there.”

Like the Nebraska affiliate, many Appleseed centers have high-profile government officials, lawyers, and professionals on their boards. In Illinois, for example, Seymour F. Simon, a former Illinois Supreme Court judge, has been donating his time through the local Appleseed center to help improve the state’s system for collecting unpaid child support. In all, 400 lawyers and others serve on the 16 centers’ boards.

Also like the one in Nebraska, the centers have been accumulating an increasingly long list of achievements working either on their own or in connection with other public advocates.

* The Massachusetts center made arrangements with a local bank to help elderly people refinance home-mortgage loans that had been offered at high interest rates by unscrupulous lenders.

* The New Jersey center helped relax the rules barring state troopers from making public statements without approval, making it possible for police officers to speak out when they were worried by instances of racism.

* In Washington, a team of Appleseed lawyers, economists, and accountants developed a plan to relieve the city of its $5-billion pension-fund liability, a problem that threatened to cost the average District of Columbia household $20,000. The plan was adopted by Congress and signed into law.

* The Texas center, working with other organizations and lawyers, helped insure that proper legal representation was being provided to people held in county jails by the Immigration and Naturalization Service.

Not every Appleseed effort ends in success, however.

The Illinois center failed in its two-year struggle in the courts and the legislature to obtain a moratorium on the state’s death penalty. However, working with other groups, the affiliate persuaded lawmakers to set up a committee to investigate the issue. The state’s supreme court has started a separate review.

In Louisiana, the Appleseed center and other groups failed in federal court to loosen restrictions that prohibited law students from providing free legal advice to groups that work in poor neighborhoods. An appeal is under way.

While the Appleseed Foundation has come a long way in six years, the network is still fairly fragile.

Most centers have just one or two staff members and budgets of only $50,000 to $100,000. The Massachusetts center has only a part-time executive director.

The Appleseed Foundation, in Washington, is better financed, with an annual budget of about $750,000 and a staff of seven. The national organization provides local centers with administrative and other support services, including a directory of leading legal and financial experts around the country who are willing to volunteer their assistance.

Still, fund raising for the Appleseed network continues to be a challenge.

Mr. Nader has been particularly disappointed by what he sees as foundations’ lukewarm response to Appleseed’s grant requests.

“Foundations keep saying they are looking for multiplier effects,” he says. Appleseed, he notes, matches every dollar it raises with nine dollars of donated time from lawyers and others.

The centers are also working to get other law-school classes, at Harvard and elsewhere, involved in similar efforts.

“What more leverage do you want than spreading this to other law-school types?” Mr. Nader asks. He attributes the lack of foundation interest to “a particular deficiency of foresight and resolve by the foundation world.”

One major exception has been George Soros’s Open Society Institute, in New York, which in recent years awarded the Appleseed Foundation $330,000 to support its elections project and to help establish more centers in Southern and Plains states where, according to the institute, there are few legal-service groups working on public-advocacy issues.

“Appleseed is attracting senior lawyers who have a lot of expertise and locally have a lot of credibility,” says Catherine Samuels, director of the foundation’s program on law and society.

She acknowledges, however, that foundations generally have been reluctant to support such public-advocacy programs, in part because grant makers “share society’s general disdain for lawyers and the legal system and litigation.”

Mr. Nader says he also is disappointed that in some parts of the country too few lawyers have been willing to donate their time and money, making the foundation re-examine its goal of setting up a separate center in every state. It has all but given up the idea of opening affiliates in the Dakotas, where, it says, there are not enough lawyers. An alternative may be to create a regional center instead.

Establishing an Appleseed affiliate takes a big commitment from participants. The national organization requires local boards to demonstrate their financial stability by raising a six-months’ operating budget within nine months of their first planning meeting. By then, the center is also expected to hire its first staff member.

Although the foundation sometimes suggests issues for the centers to consider, the local boards are free to set their own agendas. There is no preference for liberal or conservative issues; however, most of the affiliates’ causes are ones often favored by liberal groups.

Despite the time and effort it takes to start and run Appleseed centers, Richard J. Medalie, a Washington lawyer who helped found the Appleseed Foundation, says he hopes that more alumni groups try the organization’s approach. Mr. Medalie, who serves as the Appleseed Foundation’s board chairman, says Appleseed’s work has far surpassed anything he and his fellow Harvard Law School graduates anticipated when they first heard Mr. Nader pitch the idea.

“Ralph had this vision, and a lot of us were more skeptical,” he says. But he adds, “It’s worked, it’s amazing. We’ve been able to organize people who have never been organized before, and we’ve gotten various professionals together to work on things we never thought of working on before.”

Purpose: Established in 1993 by Ralph Nader and other members of the Harvard Law School Class of 1958 to encourage the creation of non-profit public-interest law centers.

Finances: The national organization raised $563,683 for the 12 months ending December 1998. Its 16 affiliated law centers are distinct non-profit organizations with separate budgets.

Sources of funds: Most of the national organization’s income last year came from gifts from individuals and grants from foundations.

Key officials: Richard J. Medalie, chair; Robert H. Mundheim, president; Linda Singer, executive director.

Address: 910 17th Street, N.W., Suite 315, Washington 20006; (202) 331-7436.

World-Wide Web site: http://www.appleseeds.net