parents and children, the elderly, veterans, the disabled, the employed, homeowners — that remains largely invisible to the rest of the country. More than 46 million Americans fall below the federally designated poverty line: $11,670 for an individual, $23,850 for a family of four, numbers calculated according to a decades-old formula widely criticized for, among other shortcomings, failing to accurately reflect today’s actual costs of living. Many more people live one small catastrophe — an injury, a car repair — from tumbling below that line as well. The problems of poverty are complex and not amenable to sound-bite solutions, and a growing body of research is offering evidence that living in poverty is itself a hazard to mental and physical health, that being poor can put you at greater risk for disease, affect your cognitive abilities, limit your capacity for decision making, and even alter your physiology at the level of gene expression.
What poverty also does, at the level of policy making and in the courtroom, is make the poor de facto second-class citizens of our civil legal system. In the courtroom, if in theory justice is impartial, in practice money buys advantage. If in theory, based on income, more than 53 million Americans would qualify for legal aid services, in practice, studies show, barely 20 percent of the legal needs of the poor are met, because there are not enough legal aid or pro bono attorneys to provide those services. “All of us learned in law school that our justice system is based upon the fact that both sides are represented — that is what leads to fairness and justice,” says Jay Speer, executive director of the VPLC. “If there are no lawyers available for those who cannot afford them, then you don’t have fairness and justice.” “With the civil justice system there are lots of rules, and if you are not a lawyer, you don’t know those Summer 2014 9