I’m still so mad about the “lack of a market” for public interest law comment. America is nothing but laws that aren’t enforced because people can’t afford to enforce them.

A good example is security deposits. Typically there are rules about how your landlord has to both hold your deposit and what they have to do to justify keeping it. Most tenants deserve theirs back and something like 75% are not returned.

But fighting a landlord means knowing how to look at that law, go to court and argue against a landlord’s attorney. Something that is not only time consuming and involves court costs but also requires an expertise in security deposit law.

I worked as a tenants’ attorney for seven years in a legal aid organization and we during they entire time turned down every single security deposit case because there was not enough time even though we were basically the only lawyers with expertise in the area

There was a huge “market” we easily turned down a thousand of these cases a year. There is only no market if you define market as “profitable to capitalism”

And that security deposit problem causes huge problems for people, in fact where I most often saw people with security deposit issues was when I was representing them in evictions against their next landlord

They would explain to me that they were behind on rent because they had been depending on the security deposit from their previous landlord.

There are laws to protect them and there is no one there to help them do it. So fuck a market analysis of the need for public interest lawyers.

Dropping in to add that this is basically every area of law every subsection of every area. Only the rich and corporations are able to fully use the protections of the American justice system.

And at some point I will do a thread on how LSC funding basically makes it impossible for legal services organizations to do impact work so it’s all crisis management.