On November 17, 2011, a tribute was made to Sargent Shriver by Brooklyn A, a member of The Legal Services Corporation, in acknowledgment of his pioneering role as leader of a community-based national legal services initiative. The organization, whose vision and mission were influenced by Sarge's efforts, dedicated its 2011 Annual Partnership Awards Benefit to his memory -- reminding us of the great strides Sargent Shriver made toward ensuring all individuals, regardless of economic status, equal access to legal aid and fair treatment by our nation's courts.

As an attorney, Sargent Shriver understood the role of the law and of lawyers in accomplishing the goal of equal justice and opportunity for low-income communities. They are a key asset in ensuring that not only individuals but whole communities can be participants in a just society.

Shriver's concept for federally funded legal services in the war on poverty involved the full understanding of the role of law and lawyers. Shriver's guiding principle across all of the anti-poverty programs was that low-income people and communities should not receive handouts, but should have access to the services and opportunities that would provide a fair chance to succeed. The original design of the war on poverty located most of the services and opportunities in community action agencies. Legal services were originally located within the community action agencies as a tool for community empowerment. They were to be at the service of community leaders, helping to ensure not only that individuals would have a fair chance in court cases, but also that the community itself have a fair chance to influence or even drive public policy decisions affecting it.

Shriver had a vision of recruiting and supporting sufficient numbers of legal services attorneys to provide reasonable access to an attorney for all low-income people in the country. He also thought that these attorneys should be linked together so that, to the extent possible, they would function as a national law firm for the poor (as opposed to isolated attorneys in scattered storefronts in low-income neighborhoods). The glue for this national law firm was the National Clearinghouse for Legal Services, located in Chicago, which published Clearinghouse Review, containing action research for lawyers, and maintained a brief bank with hundreds of thousands of poverty law documents that the attorneys could tap for ideas and models, mutual learning and strategizing.