Legal Services Corporation founded by United States Congress
The Legal Services Corporation (LSC) is a publicly funded, 501(c)(3) non-profit corporation established by the United States Congress. It seeks to ensure equal access to justice under the law for all Americans by providing funding for civil legal aid to those who otherwise would be unable to afford it. The LSC was created in 1974 with bipartisan congressional sponsorship and the support of the Nixon administration, and LSC is funded through the congressional appropriations process.
LSC has a board of eleven directors, appointed by the president of the United States and confirmed by the United States Senate, that set LSC policy. By law the board is bipartisan; no more than six members can come from the same party. LSC has a president and other officers who implement those policies and oversee the corporation's operations.LSC is the largest single funder of civil legal aid in the country, distributing more than 90 percent of its total funding to 132 independent nonprofit legal aid programs.For Fiscal Year 2023, Congress appropriated $560 million to LSC to fund civil legal aid.History
Background
LSC is one of the organizational descendants of the former Office of Economic Opportunity (OEO). The Economic Opportunity Act of 1964, a key part of President Lyndon B. Johnson's Great Society vision, established the OEO. Building on the work of a 1964 essay, "The War on Poverty: A Civilian Perspective" by Edgar Cahn and Jean Camper Cahn, in 1965 OEO budgeted $1 million per year to create and fund 269 local legal services programs around the country, such as California Rural Legal Assistance, which made a name for themselves suing local officials and sometimes stirring up resentment against their federal funding. Jean Cahn was the first director of the National
Legal Services Program in OEO.By the early 1970s the Nixon administration began dismantling the OEO; funding for legal services for the poor began to wither, and supporters looked for an alternative arrangement. In 1971 a bipartisan congressional group, including Senators Ted Kennedy, William A. Steiger, and Walter Mondale, proposed a national, independent Legal Services Corporation; at the same time, administration officials such as Attorney General John N. Mitchell and chief domestic advisor John Ehrlichman were proposing their own somewhat similar solution.