Kris Shepard's Rationing Justice provides a detailed study of the provision of free legal services to the poor in civil cases in Georgia, Alabama, and Mississippi. Such services were negligible until passage of the Economic Opportunity Act of 1964, which included monies for the creation of the nationwide Legal Services Program, which was superseded ten years later by Congress's creation of the Legal Services Corporation (LSC). At its peak in 1981, LSC funneled grants to 1,450 local offices, employing some 6,200 lawyers and 3,000 paralegals, serving 1.5 million clients (2). Always controversial, by 1996 congressional opponents of the program succeeded in cutting its budget by 30 percent and prohibiting its lawyers from bringing suits challenging the validity of restrictions on access to welfare benefits, from bringing class actions, and, when victorious, from petitioning for attorney fees (238–39).

Strong opposition to legal services came sooner in the Deep South, where local elites associated the federally funded program with the intrusion of the civil rights movement, a perception which Shepard shows to have had some basis in reality. Indeed, in 1970, in northern Mississippi legal services lawyers were handling more than two dozen school desegregation cases, a quantity only exceeded by the NAACP-Legal Defense Fund and the Justice Department (64). The same program, in close collaboration with black activists, brought suits against local authorities concerning police beatings, restrictions on the right to assemble, unequal provision of municipal services, and discriminatory hiring (205–7). These activities triggered accusations that the lawyers had themselves become activists, rather than merely their counsel, and led to internal LSC investigations of the programs, which Shepard, who disputes the allegations, describes at some length (213–18).

As with the early civil rights movements, some of the most ambitious litigation on behalf of the southern poor was engineered by sophisticated lawyers from outside the region. Most notably in the mid-1960s, Ed Sparer of the New York-based Center for Social Policy and the Law, a legal services “support office,” believed the district courts of the Deep South provided the most promising starting point for a litigation campaign challenging some of the more arbitrary barriers to the receipt of welfare benefits. He believed these courts were more likely to view suits by welfare recipients sympathetically because of the notoriously small grants provided to impoverished families in the region (the monthly grant in Mississippi for a mother with two children was $120), and because of the trail that civil rights lawyers had already blazed in the Fifth Circuit, the federal appellate court encompassing the region, which had shown itself receptive to equal protection claims based on race, and more generally, by the notoriety of both racism and poverty in the region (39). Sparer's hopes were disappointed, however, as the courts repeatedly rejected equal protection challenges based on disparate racial impact. The courts also declined to adopt his theory that the indigent had a fundamental interest in government grants that provided the minimum means of sustenance. By 1970 Sparer believed there was no realistic possibility that the Supreme Court would acknowledge such a “right to live.” His pessimism was vindicated in Dandridge v. Williams, a case originating in the border state of Maryland, which Sparer had counseled against bringing before the Court (50).

For Shepard, the cumulative effect of the program in the South was the “assimilation” of the poor into the mainstream of U.S. “legal culture, as they increasingly became consumers, not just objects, of the law” (11). Shepard, however, does little to link this broad thesis to his narrative, which is sparing in context and more thematic than chronological. The reader is given little sense of just how the lives and problems of legal services clients of the Deep South—rural or urban—were different in 1995 than in 1965.

What Shepard does provide is a thorough and well-documented account of the cases brought by legal services attorneys in the Deep South. Most of these involved mundane matters: evictions, matrimonial and custody disputes, consumer problems, and access to various government benefits and services. Shepard carefully, and at length, describes this work. By covering this relatively unexciting aspect of his subject in this way, he has undoubtedly limited the appeal of his book, but to have failed to do so. would have been to give a distorted view of his subject. Indeed, as Shepard explains in an endnote, one of his objectives was to provide balance and correct the accounts of other writers on poverty law whose focus has been on major litigation at the expense of the service provided individual clients. Shepard is successful in achieving this objective.