Jack B. Weinstein

At the beginning of this new century, enormous demographic and socioeconomic changes are taking place. These changes will further strain the American resources of fraternity that have carried us through so many crises. Accessibility to the courts and other adjudicatory institutions on roughly equal terms is essential to equality before the law. If we cannot provide this foundation of protection through the courts, many of the rest of our promises of liberty and justice for all remain a mockery for the poor and the oppressed. Equal access to the judicial process is a sign of a just society. While we have made enormous strides towards that goal, it is still a glaring truth that equality is, in the real world, often a figment of the jurisprudential imagination.

Achieving full and precise equality, even in the courts, is incredibly difficult in a society where there is so much social and economic inequality. There must be more aid to Legal Services and pro bono enterprises to begin a semblance of a balance of legal resources available to rich and poor. So, too, is insistence on adequately-funded government-supported legal services for the poor—without artificial government imposed limitations. The Association of the Bar of the City of New York and others, as well as so many individual lawyers, have struggled mightily to provide pro bono help and to fund Legal Services and Legal Aid against those who would protect their privileges by denying the rights of others. We must continue to try to accomplish the attainable, even if nearly impossible: procedural and substantive fairness and the integration of mercy and justice for the people, all the people we lawyers and judges are charged with protecting under the Rule of Law. That is the glorious public service to which we are called.

As we enter a new Millennium, we can look back 2000 years with profit when the contemporaries Hillel (60 B.C.E. to 20 C.E.) and Jesus (5 B.C.E. to 30 C.E.) laid down the central rule that should still inform our work: "Do unto others as you would have them do unto you." Lawyers cannot long keep the ethical level required by equal adjudicative justice appreciably higher than that reflected in our social ethos revealed in substantive rights for the poor; and the social-ethical level cannot long be kept artificially higher than most individual's view of what is good and just in treatment of the less fortunate. In a larger sense, then, if we would satisfy our adjudicate duties, we must also satisfy our social and individual obligations to the poor as members of the whole community.

In our complex, tripartite free-enterprise welfare-philanthropic system, no single formula can serve the poor in all their different guises and roles. The lawyer's role to improve the lives and protections of all of us is central.