The People's Champ?: Legal Aid from Slavery to Mass Incarceration

This dissertation project explores the historical development of legal aid--a woefully underexplored topic in the deluge of scholarship on criminal justice and social welfare. Most literature tracks the beginning of legal aid to the 1876 development of the Deutscher Rechts-Schutz Verein (German Legal Aid Society) in New York City. The Society was designed to protect German immigrants from unscrupulous employers, landlords, and loan sharks. It evolved into the New York Legal Aid Society in 1886 and provided a template for cities across the country. Standard treatments of legal aid either remain mum on the issues of race and ethnicity or suggest that legal aid offices provided services to individuals irrespective of social identity. My project uses a variety of sources to reconsider the historiography on legal aid. By identifying a variety of unacknowledged legal aid institutions--from the Pennsylvania Abolitionist Society of the antebellum era to the ethnic mutual aid societies of the Progressive Era--my project demonstrates how legal aid is not just about class, as common orthodoxy suggests, but is deeply woven in the social divisions of race, gender, ethnicity, and citizenship. This revised interpretation of legal history challenges assumptions about public defenders and drives the theoretical contributions of my project.The People's Champ advances the theoretical terrain by looking at indigent defense as a crucial, but underappreciated component of the welfare state. Like welfare, criminal legal aid often entails a lukewarm commitment to social justice by the federal government that establishes entitlements to services while devolving responsibility to the local and state level, which results in wildly different expressions of social inequality. I argue that indigent defense has always been and continues to be animated by competing interests and motivations that include: serious investments in egalitarianism and the rule of law; intraprofessional and societal contestation around lawyers' ethical obligations to the poor; the pesky persistence of racialized, classed, and gendered social control; the political economy of punishment; and efforts to create the symbolic appearance of justice in order to legitimate the legal system. I also explicate the importance of ethical motivations that cross the conservative-liberal divide, the role of fiscal austerity, and the populist ambivalence toward the rights of individuals accused of crimes. Since the government has the power to prosecute and punish, and because most trials between the state and the average defendant are inherently unequal, indigent defense is an important index of how the government and the legal profession manage their ethical responsibilities for the criminally accused. Taken as whole, I argue that the historical and contemporary study of public defenders offers critical insights into social welfare policy, the ebb and flow of penal changes, and mass incarceration