President Stagg, President-elect Shear, Mr. Salcines, your gracious wives, and members of the Tampa and Hillsborough County Bar Association — I am especially pleased to be here to observe Law Day with you. My good friend Sam Gibbons told me I would be in good hands here. In Tampa — a city which has been “first” again and again in Florida. I know that you had Florida’s first urban renewal program thanks to legislation a state senator by the name of Gibbons sponsored and that you had one of the first Head Start programs in the United States. Progress seems to be a habit for Tampa and Hillsborough county.
Is it a coincidence that here in the United States we celebrate Law Day - on or about the first of May? In Soviet Bloc nations May Day means something much different. In those countries, May Day is the anniversary of revolution, a time for parading mighty weapons visible reminders to the citizens that might stands ready to crush any revolt from within Prague or Budapest. But in the United States, Law Day stands in vivid contrast and symbolizes in many ways the difference between a free society and a police state.
For us, Law Day should be a reminder that one of our oldest and most conservative traditions—a tradition which comes from the long history of English common law is that the citizen in a free society is the sovereign power, that he gives some of his sovereignty to government for the collective well being of the state or community but that governmental power derives from law and is not itself above the law. No single development in recent years stands out as more historic or more significant than the backing which the organized bar has given to the OEO Legal Services program. The Bar endorsed it. The Bar supported it.
And the Bar has fought to protect the professional integrity of the lawyers within the program. This Bar Association and the entire organized Bar have, by those actions, contributed vitally to the rule of law in this country because by your actions, you have made it possible for the poor to believe that justice was possible within the system.
After the past two weeks in Washington, it’s a pleasure to spend Law Day in Tampa. I’ve been watching, at first hand, the performance of the nation’s biggest law firm, the Department of Justice. and I must say, if you had compiled for your biggest client the kind of record that the Justice Department has run up over the past ten days, you would probably be without a client. I hope John Mitchell did better when he was with Nixon, Mudge Guthrie and Rose.
Attorney General Mitchell appeals defeat – telling court that he needs to tap telephones without court approval stating that surveillance of domestic radicals is in the national defense interest. Attorney General Mitchell loses nine-zip in the Supreme Court bussing decision-his client had been relying upon his advice rather heavily. On Wednesday, Judge Hart blasts the Justice Department and the Attorney General for “making a mockery of the federal judiciary” by first asking Judge Hart, Chief Justice Burger, and then the entire Supreme Court en bank to enjoin against the Vietnam vets from camping on the Mall. Then, two days later, the Justice Department asks that the injunction be dissolved because it has decided not to enforce the injunction.
And then next day, the Attorney General is criticized in the bluntest of language by a three judge panel sitting in Biloxi, Mississippi for abdicating his legal responsibility to determine as Chief Legal Officer for the administration a provision of the Federal Voting Rights Act. So you can see why I say: it’s a pleasure to be in Tampa on Law Day — with a group of lawyers that I am confident have a better batting average.
Would that the Justice Department was as modern and efficient as the marvelous Tampa airport I came through this morning. It is certainly the first airport I’ve seen that was built with the idea that the passenger came first and not the aircraft. But what I wonder, happens to the passenger in our government of laws? Does he come first? And particularly does he come first with the Department of Justice?
Today, at this celebration of Law Day, I call for the creation of a new Department of Justice — a genuine Department of Justice — one that puts the citizen first. It is time to organize government in order to serve the people around what President Nixon called “the great missions of government.” You may recall that four months ago, in his State of the Union message, the president called for a massive reorganization of government. He proposed to eliminate the Departments of Labor, Commerce, Transportation, Agriculture and others and to consolidate eight such cabinet departments into four.
Yet, the most astonishing thing about the president’s proposals — his sweeping plan for reform — was not what the president proposed to change but what he left unchanged. Treasury, State, Defense and Justice. Treasury, State, and Defense obviously need no tampering with — if one is prepared to assume that our economy is in perfect shape, our foreign relations universally harmonious, and our military posture invincible. but that does still leave the Justice Department.
And here, I cite no less an authority than the Chief Justice of the United States, Warren Burger, as my “authority for the proposition that our legal system is in a state of grave disrepair.” Today, at this Law Day celebration, I ask you, what does the Constitution itself say is the first mission of government after the formation of the Union? It is the establishment of justice, yes that mission appears to have been overlooked by the president — perhaps as part of his policy of benign neglect.
The chief beneficiary of such benign neglect appears to have been the Director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation by law, he is subordinate to the Attorney General. In fact, it appears that no attorney general or president dares ask him to retire or resign. At the Peace Corps, we fought to have a rule written into the statute which prohibited any person from serving more than five years. We did that to keep fresh ideas and energies coming into the top positions. Hardening of the administrative arteries is a disturbing, if not tragic, comment on the state of justice today that the head of the FBI is himself above the civil service and above the law.
Justice or more accurately, injustice, I have come to believe, is the single, most direct and important cause of our nation’s problems today. Injustice is more unbearable than hunger; injustice causes more dope addiction than the greed of the producers and pushers of heroin because injustice creates the customers-those who have lost hope in everything.
Injustice is the cause of poverty; injustice robs every person of human dignity. Injustice sows the seeds of rebellion.
Maybe you read about Costa Gavras. Costa Gavras is the motion picture director who created “Z” the great prize-winning movie of three years ago. He has created another masterpiece, “The Confession”, and the story of a highly placed Czech communist caught in the Prague Revolution of 1968.
Costa Gavras, with a creative artist’s intuition into the world’s problems, today, says this:
”...official injustice is the greatest of all violence, because that’s where violence begins. Violence is not the policeman who beats you or the soldier who kills you. They’re only the visible agents. It is injustice which is behind the club or the gun. Revolutionary violence is too often judged by the image it gives, never by its roots. From where does this violence come? Always from injustice and the worst is injustice in the name of justice....”
Costa Gavras has touched the nerve center, the pressure point. By focusing on injustice he has revealed the deepest source of our anguish as a nation. His insight explains the alienation of young people the antagonism against the war: the fervor of those who struggle for civil rights: the terrifying acceptance of drugs: the deserters from Yale and Harvard now in Canada or Sweden: the senseless bombings by the Weathermen: and the need for a “new consciousness,” as Charles Reich calls it, or for a new, deeper, more sensitive “moral consciousness” as religious people would call it – a heightened awareness of sin, of evil, of the devil, of the struggle, against wickedness within ourselves and in high places, of “injustice in the name of justice.”
But, what can we do about injustice?
Perhaps we could start with words of the poet, Kahlil Gibran. with six lines of poetry he shows us the way:
He says:
“The righteous is not innocent of the Deeds of the wicked: You cannot separate the just from the unjust, and the good from the wicked: for they stand Together, before the face of the sun, Even as the black thread and the white are woven together. And when the black thread breaks, the Weaver shall look into the whole cloth, and he shall examine the loom also……"
Kahlil Gibran tells all of us, here in Tampa and elsewhere, that we “the righteous”, are not innocent of the deeds of the wicked — Charles Manson, Lieutenant William Calley, the Weathermen, or the Minutemen, he tells us further to look to the whole cloth and to the loom which produced the cloth in other words, to our whole society and to the schools, churches, corporations, labor unions, country clubs, social registers, courts and government the loom which has produced our cloth, and he says that we must look into ourselves — for we are the weavers!
Yet who, I ask, is looking at the whole cloth? Who, I ask, is examining the loom itself? Certainly and tragically, not the Department of Justice.
Look at the situation with the criminal law itself since that aspect of justice is most talked about today even in this particular field, the Department offers no bold vision of justice. Instead of concentrating justice, it continues to engage almost exclusively in a most expensive game of cops and robbers.
While the FBI spends millions looking for the sixteen most wanted fugitives — it used to be ten — but they have been unable to apprehend several young women many more millions erecting a new building in Washington which dwarfs the Department of Justice next door, who in this entire justice establishment is thinking about the victims of crime?
The man, woman or child who is mugged, - robbed or beaten who worries about justice for him or her? They get less attention and certainly less help - than the victims of automobile accidents I saw in a recent issue of the Florida Bar Journal that you are having quite a debate here in the state over “no-fault” insurance. It is amazing to me that the Secretary of Transportation can advocate “no-fault” automobile insurance, but as far as know, the Department of Justice has never proposed, nor even thought of “no-fault” insurance to get the victim of crime back on his feet instead. Justice offers us a vision of more efficient and mechanized systems of surveillance and apprehension of offenders, cosmetic reform of penal institutions, and expedited court dockets but no indication that a true concept of justice implies the possibility that each of us is morally responsible in allowing conditions which spawn crime and violence to exist — that indeed the righteous is not innocent of the deeds of the wicked.”
First, let us call the present Department of Justice what it is, in fact — a department of prosecution, if not persecution! Let’s leave it with its emphasis on catching crooks. Let’s establish in addition a new and genuine Ministry of Justice — an agency concerned about official lawlessness, one which does not equate law enforcement with tanks one which is as concerned about civil justice welfare, consumer fraud...housing law. To put it another way, we ought to have a Justice Department structured on the premise that the guarantee of justice to every American is as important as the guaranty of life itself, as the right to breathe and to pursue life, liberty, and happiness. The Department of Justice should be the loved by the many, not just feared by few. It’s role in our society must be and it must be respected for the rights it guarantees and protects, affirmative, it must be a sense of change and reform rather than for the rights it invades.
Second, we need to extend our basic awareness of justice and injustice into institutions where courts and lawyers rarely wander. Take the schools where little children may be subject to abusive and arbitrary treatment in the name of discipline, or hospitals and mental institutions where patients are neglected or experimented on, or deprived of benefits, or governmental bureaucracies where people who blow “ethical whistles” as Ralph Nader says are subjected to subtle or not so subtle retaliation, or finally corporations which exert as many controls on our lives as any governmental power but which stand outside the sphere of public accountability we require of government. We must begin to find ways to establish justice within the confines of those closed systems — those institutions which encompass much of our daily lives as students, employees, or citizens and to see that injustice whenever and wherever it occurs can be met with legal advocacy in a forum where redress can be secured.
Third, where government has power to do good, it has the power equally to do injury. It does not have to intend to injure, injury borne of negligence is no excuse. The bulldozer which clears a right of way for a federal highway may impose costs on a citizen for which the government provides no compensation. Should a citizen have to bear extra costs for the activities of his government? We must develop new institutions to hold government agencies - grant making, regulatory, planning, urban development what have accountable to those persons they were intended to serve, citizens have to be protected from being directly or indirectly, injured by actions of officials. Truly, if lawfulness and justice are not firmly fixed as first principles of official behavior, where will we find them?
Fourth, I would suggest that the legal profession acting through schools of law, nationwide should establish a network of urban “teaching law firms” to answer affirmatively the needs of ghetto residents for critically scarce legal resources. These “teaching law firms” would serve much the same purpose that the great university affiliated teaching hospitals serve, to provide tangible service to the community while assuring practical education for young practitioners and students. We have the beginnings of such “teaching law firms” already the Western Center for Law and Poverty at USC, the Urban Law Institute in Washington, DC and others they are important first steps in what should be the wave of the future for legal education.
Fifth, we must now give priority to research and development in the field of justice. We need a national Institute of Justice comparable in size and power to the National Institutes of Health. At present the R&D budget for Justice is $9 million annually; the R&D budget this year for the Department of Defense is $8.5 billion. Thus, to improve justice for our own people we spend 1/10th of 1% of the amount spent to improve our capacity to kill our enemies! Yet where does charity begin? This R&D effort in justice would invest funds in legal education, in training laymen to serve as advocates or para-professionals in many areas where legal professionals are scarce. We would be researching and studying the alarming growth of crimes of violence, the relation of gun ownership and use to crimes of violence. we would be investigating drug abuse and corporate lawlessness in regard to pollution and drugs. we would be studying how to make government more accountable to the citizen at all levels — municipal, state, and federal. In our country, which annually spends only $167 million dollars for the entire federal court system, could stand this kind of investment in preventive justice. Everyone favors preventive medicine, and some people even favor preventive detention —but I say, why don’t we invest more in the places where the criminal mind is formed, and thus prevent injustice from starting or increasing?
Sixth, we need to radically redefine the relation of the legal system to the people — we need to use community resources to the maximum to meet neighborhood problems. I am not talking about vigilante squads or systems to spy on each other from behind closed curtains. I am talking about the possibility for dealing with juvenile first offenders — the kid on the block who steals something for “kicks” who might respond to social pressure from within his own neighborhood more favorably than he now responds to being booked, fingerprinted, or jailed, there to learn more about the art of grand larceny. Our juvenile courts are full of such first offenders – in some cities efforts have been made to set up neighborhood centers to settle disputes arising within that neighborhood and thereby to avoid the formality and time consuming process of court adjudication, we may after all be coming to realize, as did the first Americans, the Indians, that many kinds of minor legal problems can be solved within the community if there is a sense of community.
I call then today for a restructuring of the Justice Department around the underlying mission of this country: to establish justice.
And I call upon you, here in Tampa, to translate that mission into institutions which will establish justice right here in Tampa for the citizens of Tampa.
For in the final analysis: we are not merely lawyers for our clients we are officers of the court committed to see that justice is done.
What can you do here in Tampa to eliminate injustice especially official injustice and to bring justice in new ways to the people of Tampa, rich and poor, black and white?
I am an outsider and it is presumptuous of me to make suggestions from the outside.
However, your law school, Stetson, is known even to outsiders as Florida’s oldest law school.
I propose to you that the bar of Tampa undertake to set up a Tampa Center for Justice by sponsoring with Stetson Law School a “teaching law firm” where students at the law school, working under supervision of members of the bar could begin to provide new types of services to the Tampa community. Now, in law school, is the time for young law students to absorb—the ethos of public service that is the hall mark of our profession. But now, too, is the time to move legal education beyond what Chief Justice Burger called the “post-mortem” approach to legal education — to bring law students into contact with real problems and real injustices. The graduates of Stetson would be better lawyers — but more important, the cause of justice would have been advanced.
I am not just suggesting that the bar sponsor a new legal aid office - too often young lawyers think only in terms of litigation. But each of us in daily practice devises alternatives to litigation to serve the interests of our clients most effectively.
Such a “teaching law firm” could develop law courses for teenagers to be taught in the high schools. It could help design and run a complaint center to enable the city government to respond more effectively to the needs, concerns and complaints of the citizenry. It could design as has been done in one city, TV spots to inform the public about consumer fraud and how to deal with it. In one instance a consumer help clinic, run by law students processed over two thousand complaints in a year and resolved over 80% of them to the satisfaction of the complaining party.
Such a local center for justice could monitor the activities of the federal government and the effectiveness of federal programs as they work or fail to work — right here in Tampa. And we have had ample indication that programs like food stamps, relocation programs, medicare and medicaid programs, housing programs are riddled with defects that need detection and remedy.
Your legal service program here can only do part of the job. But a Center for Justice, run under the sponsorship of this Bar association could be a focus for bold new experiments in bringing justice to the people.
Law school and the Bar need to be brought closer together and the grave problems that beset our society need to be subjected to study by the profession and law schools together. Why is it only in Saskatchewan, Canada, and New Zealand that they have insurance for the victims of crime? Why is it only in Sweden and once again, in Saskatchewan and New Zealand that they have an ombudsman to receive citizens complaints?
What is being done right now in Tampa to explore the feasibility of no-fault insurance programs?
And why should Shreveport, Louisiana, stand alone in experimenting with the feasibility of prepaid legal insurance plans?
I reject the notion of justice as static.
I reject the divine right of J. Edgar Hoover to remain as Director of the FBI in perpetuity.
And today, in the spirit of that quest for a dynamic concept of justice, I issue two challenges: one national, the other local.
I challenge the Department of Justice to become in substance what it is in name and I call for a sweeping reorganization of that department in terms of the mission of the 70s.
And here in Tampa, I challenge the bar to set up your own local Justice Department — a true center for justice — in partnership with Stetson Law School.
The quest for justice is an unending quest. We must dare to dream. We must do more than dream for the job to be done is not just in Washington. In the words of Deuteronomy 30:11-14:
“For this commandment which I command thee. This day, it is not hidden from thee, neither is it far off. It is not in heaven that thou shouldest say, who shall go up for us to heaven, and bring it unto us, that we may hear it and do it? Neither is it beyond the sea that thou shouldest say: who shall go over the sea for. us, and bring it unto us, that we may hear it, and do it?”
I can assure you it is not in Washington either that the work must go forward but rather, as that passage concludes:
“The word is very nigh unto thee, in they mouth, and in thy heart that thou mayest do it.”
And so I say to you, it is nigh unto you, in your mouth and in your heart. Let us begin now — and here, today.
