REMARKS AS PREPARED FOR DELIVERY BY SENIOR COUNSELOR FOR

ACCESS TO JUSTICE LAURENCE TRIBE AT THE FEDERAL

GOVERNMENT PRO BONO PROGRAM KICK OFF

NEW YORK

Thank you for your kind introduction, Preet. And thank you for all the good work
that you and your colleagues are doing in the Southern District of New York. I also want
to thank Laura Klein, whose leadership made today possible and whose dedication has
made so many lives better - in D.C., Chicago, and, now, New York. And many thanks to
all of you who have helped to bring our federal governments Pro Bono Program to the
next level. Your work inspires me, as it inspires everyone working to close the justice
gap in America.

Im grateful to each of you for taking valuable time to be here today and at least
explore the possibility of becoming part of the new pro bono program being launched
here in New York City. Its a program that, as you know, draws on federal employees to
provide otherwise unavailable legal aid. Im talking about people who, like all of you,
are already proud servants of the public in their day jobs but who have decided to take on,
in addition, the burdens and commitments of still more pro bono work for people in need
an undertaking for which no-one will ever be able to thank each of you enough.

The launch of the federal government pro bono program here in the worlds
greatest city is no small occasion. Many organizations have studied ways to narrow the
justice gap in our country both in criminal matters and on the civil side and formed
commissions to address the problem and task forces to look at solutions. We talk a lot
about making justice more accessible, equal and fair. But today we do more than talk.
Today we take action. In what we do here today, justice becomes an active verb.

In fact, it was the opportunity to move from words to action that brought me to
the Department of Justice to lead the Departments new initiative on Access to Justice.
Id spent 40 years writing and arguing cases and teaching students at Harvard and loved
every minute of it. As you may have heard, I was blessed to have taught and mentored
many truly remarkable young people in my role as a law professor, including our
President, the Chief Justice who swore him into office, John Roberts, and his newest
nominee to the Supreme Court, Elena Kagan. Ill never minimize the privilege I had in
working with such amazingly talented individuals and helping them launch their public
careers. But the time had come to act, and when the President I admire so deeply, and the
Attorney General I respect so tremendously, asked me to lead the administrations new
initiative for Access to Justice, I jumped at the chance to move from mostly talking to
actually doing. And thats what I celebrate about your presence here today. All of you
at least I hope all of you are about to do something truly significant. When you sign on
to this endeavor, you will be helping people who are struggling with profound personal,
family and community challenges. For here in the program in New York City, justice
truly meets the streets.

1
 I dont know about you, but when I was in law school I envisioned the world of
pro bono lawyering largely in terms of civil rights and civil liberties, the sexy stuff of free
speech and gay rights, the exoneration of the wrongly accused and the rescue of the
falsely detained. Ive long since learned that life is more complex. Theres a great New
Yorker cartoon that shows a ship that looks a lot like the Mayflower sailing toward land
barely visible along the horizon. One pilgrim looks thoughtfully into the distance and
tells his companion, You know, religious freedom is my immediate objective . . . but my
long-term goal is to go into real estate.

Well, it turns out that the world of real estate, writ large, is the world where lots of
lifes struggles, struggles with greedy landlords and lenders over intolerable living
conditions and threats of avoidable foreclosure and eviction play out, and where you can
play perhaps your most constructive roles. Ill let one government lawyers experience
tell what turns out to be a recurring story. Hes a DOJ lawyer named Michael who works
in the Environmental and Natural Resource Division an attorney who had handled
plenty of complex cases in his time but who found himself more deeply engaged than
ever when he stood up in superior court on behalf of a pro bono client he met up with for
the first time as a volunteer at a Saturday clinic. His client Ill call her Joanne to
preserve her privacy faced unbelievable problems. She was raising four small children,
two of her own and two grandchildren, in the most deplorable imaginable conditions.
There were holes in the walls where the rats had chewed through and essentially
overtaken the lower portion of the house. At night the rats and the roaches owned the first
floor. The only refuge for the children was to hide in their bedrooms with their doors shut
tight. Surrounded by violence and drug-dealing, Joanne pleaded with her landlord to deal
with the rat and rodent infestation, the lice and electrical problems that made their
apartment all but uninhabitable. But the landlord tried to blame her for all the problems in
his building, so she fought back, seeking help at the clinic where Michael happened to
show up as a federal volunteer. Representing her became a highlight of his career.
Although Ive spent much time in a courtroom, he said, its so different when you
have a womans home and family in your briefcase. Not only did he help her prevail
and to change her life but he came to have enormous admiration for her courage and
her persistence. You never know, he said, where your client is coming from until you
live a day in her shoes. She had persevered through such incredible adversity that he was
convinced If anyone is the hero in this case, its her. Michael had found his connection
with his client, and it was mutual hero worship.

This is the truly wonderful thing about the pro bono legal work that Laura Kleins
program is launching here in New York. Its not just what each of you will bring to the
cause of justice its also what the cause of justice will bring to you. From the legal
work you do in New York, you will bring back with you an understanding of the
problems people confront with our legal system that will change who you are and the
way you approach whatever else you do in your day jobs with the federal government.
Those with whom and for whom you work in the federal offices you occupy will in turn
absorb the lessons you have learned, lessons sometimes too deep to articulate in a simple
report of what you happened to do over the weekend.

2
 It happened to me shortly after I arrived in my new job in the Justice Department
at the beginning of March this year. I spent a morning at a legal clinic in a tough part of
Washington DC, in Anacostia. Laura Klein was the indispensable organizer and critical
resource, but I was part of a group of a dozen or more federal volunteers, many of them,
that day at least, from the Justice Department. All of us were there for the same reason:
to do what we could, in a short time and, thankfully, under the supervision of folks who
knew more than we did about the substantive legal areas involved for men and women in
genuine need. The need was obvious to us as we pulled into the parking lot under grey
skies and saw our soon-to-be clients, waiting patiently in the rain and bitter cold for the
clinic to open at 8 in the morning. I could see that those of us who were volunteering that
day were in a unique position to make some peoples lives a little more hopeful. I knew
then, and truly knew by the time I was ready to go home, that I couldnt have spent the
day in any more meaningful or rewarding way. But I wont lie: it was challenging, too!
My first client was a man who had come to the clinic with a question about his mothers
will, a simple enough question surely, for an attorney. When I told him to hang on while
I asked someone, or looked up something online, about the law of wills and trusts, he
turned suspicious. Arent you a lawyer? he asked. I assured him I was, but Im not sure
he was convinced!

That experience felt like a hologram of what the Access to Justice Initiative Im
leading in the Justice Department is all about and a microcosm of what the Federal
Governments Pro Bono Program is for. And it fit perfectly with my own vision of
justice, which is in some ways the opposite of what has been described as the trickle-
down theory the theory that, if we help those at the top, those at the bottom will
eventually benefit from the fallout. Ive never been convinced about that. But I am
convinced that, if we help those at the bottom, we will necessarily raise the level of the
great river of justice that flows when barriers to law are lowered when law is a source
of solace, not oppression.

Spending a morning at that clinic in Anacostia highlighted for me a number of

truths that have become central to my work at the Justice Department in moving the
Access to Justice Initiative forward: that law needs to be accessible to people in their
communities, where they live and work and not just at courthouses and in detention
facilities; that locally-based, community-driven efforts are likely to be the most
sustainable; that such efforts need to be guided and supplemented by self-help desks and
kiosks and other user-friendly intake points where people who might have no idea of
what kinds of help they need (or what kinds of benefits they might be eligible to receive)
can find sources of information and empowerment, through systems designed to help
them help themselves; that we need to study what makes such systems work better in
some places and under some circumstances than others; and that, by spreading practices
that work to places in need we can gradually make justice a reality for people to whom it
is now mostly a dream. The nationwide effort my office is working to construct is built
on those foundations, and theyre foundations that came to life for me during a morning I
might have wasted had I not spent it in that clinic in Anacostia.

So, too, the experience you will take with you from the pro bono work you will do

3
as volunteers will enrich and inform you in perhaps unexpected ways. The fact that you
will be doing that work as a volunteer whose regular job is with the federal government
will in turn enrich and inform your federal workplace in ways nobody can entirely
predict. Of course, private attorneys or attorneys in state or municipal government who
serve as pro bono volunteers will bring their experiences with them as well. But the fact
that it is the otherwise remote federal government that youll be enriching is, from the
perspective of the United States, a distinct source of value. Put simply, the national
government itself gains from the work you will be doing as volunteers in this effort, and
its a gain of genuine significance.

And its a two-way street. Because make no mistake: To the people you will aid
and the communities you will touch, it matters greatly that those reaching out to help
them rescue their lives from disaster work for the federal government. When its a
federal employee who helps someone avoid a life-shattering mortgage foreclosure or
finds a safe home for a victim of domestic violence, what is otherwise a remote and
abstract commitment of a distant government becomes an immediate and concrete
helping hand. Federal plans to combat unwarranted foreclosure or to improve financial
conditions assume a totally different reality when the rubber meets the road.

And, quite frankly, the rubber meets the road a lot here in New York City. One in
five families living in emergency shelters in the city were recently evicted from their
homes. Studies show that a majority of tenants unable to afford a lawyer in Housing
Court receive a final judgment of eviction, but only 22 percent of represented tenants do.
In one survey, New York Citys Human Resources Administration found that the lawyers
it has funded to represent tenants had a 90 percent success rate. Lawyers make a
difference you can make a difference.

Now, its true that your federal employment limits the kinds of cases you can take
on. For example, you cannot represent defendants in criminal cases or people facing
deportation, so the much-discussed crisis in indigent defense, and the terrible plight of
unaccompanied immigrant children, 8,000 of whom come to this country each year
without a parent or guardian to watch over them and are then detained by immigration
officials on the way to deportation, are problems with which you wont be able to offer
any direct assistance. But even those problems will be indirectly relieved by the work
you are permitted to do in this program. Think about it: By doing your part, you enlarge
the ranks of lawyers providing pro bono services to those in dire need of legal help you
enlarge the size of the pie even though there are some slices youre not permitted to
touch. So, when non-government lawyers are faced with the difficult decision of either
helping people facing wrongful eviction or loss of parental rights, on the one hand, or
representing indigent juveniles facing prolonged detention or poor immigrants seeking
asylum, on the other hand, theyll know that experienced federal lawyers like you are
helping to meet one set of needs, freeing them up to meet others.

So theres just no doubt that you will all be doing something of enormous value in
taking part in this pro bono program. To make it possible for this program, and others
like it that my initiative is encouraging, to have maximum effect throughout the country,

4
we need to devote considerable energy to the promotion of rule changes that permit
federal government attorneys to do pro bono work where their offices are located
regardless of where in the nation they are licensed to practice law rule changes modeled
on D.C. Court of Appeals Rule 49 and to the adoption of rules that authorize the
unbundling of legal services and permit more attorneys to offer crucial short-term free
legal services where needed, rules like ABA Model Rules of Professional Conduct 1.2
and 6.5. And Im proud to announce today that my Access to Justice Initiative has
enthusiastically joined with Laura Klein and her office to support those rules changes
throughout the United States. Its just one of the many ways my team will be working
with Lauras office to improve access to justice nationwide. Its among the many
initiatives were moving on and weve only been in existence for three and a half
months!

I have to say that my suite of offices in the Robert F. Kennedy Building in

Washington, fondly known as Main Justice, isnt either large or particularly
impressive, and my legal staff isnt large either. But theres one thing thats huge about
our office: Its the sign outside my door. It says, simply, Access to Justice. People
who have visited me there and they have included state and federal judges, prosecutors,
public defenders, and leaders of charitable organizations have often paused to have
their photos taken . . . not with me, mind you, but with the sign on my door. And many
have openly marveled that there is, at long last, such a sign somewhere in the vast
Department of Justice. Im proud to be associated with that sign and with what it
represents.

I dont underestimate the magnitude of the challenge we face. Im constantly

reminded by others and often remind myself that making justice truly accessible and
equal is a tall order not least because justice and law are anything but synonymous.
Law is a means. Justice is an end. All too often throughout world history, and the
history of our own country, law has been an instrument not of justice but of injustice, of
oppression and exploitation, of discrimination and subordination.

But it is precisely when I remember that difficult truth that I remember, at the
same moment, what it was that drew me to this administration and this President in the
first place. President Obama is fond of saying we grow. We change. We learn. With
occasional steps backwards, we evolve. He spoke and thought that way as my student
and research assistant when I first worked with him back in 1989. Even then, he was
fond of quoting our Constitutions preamble: in order to form a more perfect Union.
He has always been focused on how it was part of the genius of our founding documents,
of the framework of our government, that it was capable of evolution and self-correction,
of moving past even a sin as terrible as slavery, of transcending a history shadowed by
tragedy.

And the spirit of self-correction isnt morally neutral. Just as the arc of the moral
universe, as Martin Luther King famously reminded us, bends toward justice, so the spirit
of self-correction moves always toward accepting responsibility for one another, always
toward inclusiveness and service, never toward mere greed and self-interest. The road is

5
long, one of my favorite songs says, With many a winding turn/ That leads us to who
knows where/ Who knows when/ But Im strong/ Strong enough to carry him/ He aint
heavy, hes my brother.