As if leaving an abusive relationship wasn’t hard enough, Chicago native Veronica Gonzalez faced major legal hurdles in 2016 after escaping her abuser through the back door of a doctor’s office and riding in the trunk of a good Samaritan’s car.
For several years, Gonzalez had suffered at the hands of her abusive ex-boyfriend and his family after she left home at 16 to move with them to Washington state. Her ex took her wages, punched her, and ripped out her hair, leaving a bald spot the size of a quarter. Complicit in the abuse, his mother once dragged Gonzalez back into the room as she tried to flee and call the police and watched her son beat Gonzalez without intervening.
Although Gonzalez successfully returned to safety in Chicago, her ex created a multijurisdictional legal nightmare when she attempted to secure a protective order and custody of their three-year-old son.
A high school dropout at the time, Gonzalez could not afford a lawyer, and her family couldn’t either. But with the initial help of a law student, and eventually lawyers who represented her pro bono through two legal aid organizations, Gonzalez obtained a two-year protective order and sole custody of her son — but only after her lawyers convinced two separate courts to keep her case in Chicago and not in Washington, where her ex had argued the litigation belonged.
“My legal case was complicated and I was endangered,” Gonzalez said last Tuesday during testimony before the U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee. “I am very fortunate that I was able to be represented by Legal Aid Chicago and the Northwest Justice Project.”
Now a full-time student and a board member of Legal Aid Chicago, Gonzalez was one of four witnesses who testified before the Judiciary Committee in an effort to convince Congress to increase its funding to Legal Services Corporation. Congress created LSC in 1974 to provide financial support for civil legal aid to low-income Americans. LSC currently provides funding to 130 legal aid programs across all 50 states, the District of Columbia and U.S. territories. Other witnesses included Texas Supreme Court Chief Justice Nathan Hecht, LSC President Ron Flagg and Nikole Nelson, who is the CEO of Alaska nonprofit Frontline Justice, which aims to close the civil justice gap through the utilization of nonlawyer frontline justice workers.
Gonzalez is an anomaly. While she was able to obtain lawyers through legal aid, a vast majority of fellow domestic abuse survivors are not so lucky. Legal aid organizations across the country help hundreds of thousands of domestic violence victims annually, but a lack of resources forces them to turn away just as many (roughly 550,000), Flagg said during his testimony. Also due to a lack of resources, LSC turns away more than 1 million eligible households facing eviction and 140,000 eligible veterans.
“These numbers actually understate the problem because they do not include those who do not seek legal aid because they do not realize they are facing a legal problem, or they are unaware of the existence of legal aid, or they earn just a little bit more than our eligibility guidelines, which are very strict,” Flagg said.
According to a 2022 study released by LSC, nearly 75 percent of low-income households had experienced at least one civil legal problem in the past year. The study also found that low-income Americans receive no or inadequate assistance for 92 percent of their significant legal issues.
“Given these figures, it is no surprise that only 28 percent of low-income Americans believe that our civil legal system treats them fairly,” Flagg said.
Last week’s Senate hearing follows a budget request issued in March by LSC for its 2025 fiscal year that asks for $1.8 billion in funding. State attorneys general and law firm managing partners across the country have filed letters in support of LSC’s request. The request for additional funding for FY 2025, which begins Oct. 1, came days after Congress passed flat funding of $560 million for LSC’s 2024 fiscal year, a figure that Flagg suggested was woefully inadequate during his testimony. He noted that LSC’s budget in FY 1994 was $400 million.
“Three decades later, this appropriation has only inched up to $560 million — as was described, not nearly enough to keep up with inflation, recessions, the pandemic and increases in the poverty population,” said Flagg, who was a partner at Sidley Austin before joining LSC in 2013 as its vice president and general counsel. “If our appropriation in FY 1980 of $300 million had simply been adjusted to inflation, our appropriation today would be over $1 billion. And research shows that for every dollar invested in civil legal aid, $3 to $13 is realized in return.”
Texas is a local example of this return-on-investment phenomenon. Last year, the Texas Legislature approved $3.7 in additional funding for civil legal services, administered through the Texas Access to Justice Foundation. Hecht, who has been a longtime advocate for Access to Justice’s funding efforts, told me at the time that the legislature added funds for pro bono civil legal services to the state’s permanent budget after the Texas Supreme Court and Access to Justice “proved the worth” of the funding.
“For years, the Texas Legislature, state leaders and policymakers have recognized how important funding legal aid is for a strong and healthy society,” Hecht said during a June 2023 interview.
During his Senate testimony last week, Hecht reversed the rhetoric by explaining exactly how the civil justice gap is hurting the country.
“It hurts the millions of people that legal services providers must turn away for want of resources, or who think help is impossible, or who don’t even know they need help,” Hecht said. “It burdens the courts, which do not and cannot function well when most parties in 18 million civil cases a year in state courts don’t have lawyers. It burdens the legal profession whose noble tradition it is to represent parties pro bono, even though grocers are not expected to feed the poor for free, builders to house them for free, or even doctors to treat them for free.”
“The justice gap burdens society, the economy, businesses and taxpayers who must pick up the costs of people’s inability to make do because of unmet civil legal needs that study after study has confirmed,” Hecht continued. “And perhaps worst of all, the justice gap hurts the integrity of the justice system, keeping it from performing as Americans are entitled to expect.”
“The justice gap — which is a chasm, really — is indisputable,” Hecht said. “The justice gap hurts us all.”
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Chief Justice Hecht’s word usage of “chasm” to describe America’s civil justice gap really caught my attention. It’s a vivid word, made even more vivid from my recent late-night Nintendo Switch binges playing “Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom.” In the game, players can reach the “depths” — an underworld of sorts — by paragliding down various chasms sprinkled throughout the land of Hyrule. Artful maneuvering down the chasms is essential. If you come into contact with the “gloom,” a charred goo resembling lava, character Link loses not only hearts, but the ability to restore said hearts, which really puts you in a pickle if you didn’t stock up on heart-restoring wild greens beforehand.
I can’t help but think of this as the perfect analogy for America’s access to justice problem. The larger the chasm, the more prone we are to a deficit in the vitality of our society, our economy, our physical and mental wellbeing.
All it takes is green to solve the problem.