Legal Aid Bureau was performing its functions according to the legal standards of the law school. This the professor has done consistently during the past two years. He comes to supervise the actual work assigned to the students and to review the reports they make. From the standpoint of the Legal Aid Bureau it was agreed in the contract to provide certain types of work for the students-tasks which the faculty of the law school under Dean Wigmore's leadership, felt would be of educational advantage to the Senior students. In the first place, there was interviewing. I need not speak to this audience of the value of the first interview. It is as important for the young attorney in a lawyer's office to know how to meet a new client and to carry on the first conversation as it is for the social worker. It was agreed to assign a certain number of interviews to each student, and in addition a certain amount of searching of public records. In fact, the law students have been given a great deal of that to do. They also go out from the office to interview witnesses when it is inconvenient or impossible to persuade these witnesses to come to the office, and sometimes they interview defendants in the endeavor to settle cases without litigation. The Legal Aid Bureau must take some cases into court. The students, under the direction of the attorneys, help there. They are unable to do much court work, however, because they cannot appear in court as attorneys. They ask for continuances, make motions, hold cases until the attorney arrives, and in such ways become familiar with the personnel and procedure of the courts. They also search law books. Often information is needed on certain cases, and the students help in searching for the laws which are applicable.

That, in general, is the theory of the undertaking. How is it working? To answer that question it will be necessary to speak a little about the administration of the organization. The Legal Aid Bureau has a central office with five attorneys. There are also five district offices with trained legal aid workers. The attorneys in the general office handle the cases that come to litigation and advise the district workers about the proper procedure in others. It is the aim to settle cases as much as possible out of court. When assigned to the legal clinic, the law student is given a special assignment. Each student spends part of his hours in the central office and part in a district office. He is asked to write a daily report setting forth what he was assigned to do, what he did, and whether he succeeded or not. These reports are sent to the senior attorney in the central office, who goes through them with the professor from the law school. On the basis of these reports the professor meets the Senior students every other week and consults with them about the cases they are handling and the legal problems they are meeting.

I believe firmly that this thing is of value to the society and to the students. In the first place, it makes the society better known. Is it worth while for a family organization in addition to the usual functions, to give legal aid? I believe it is. It helps the public to know what family service means. It adds weight to the argument that while material relief is important it is only one function and the easiest function of a family society. In the second place, it has helped us in efficiency. It has raised the standard of our work. If you have an expert person coming three times a week to advise and consult about your daily work, as the years go by the work is bound to improve. The professor from the law school does just this, and of course the work of the bureau is improving! In the third place, it adds to the dignity and support of the organization. There used to be, and there still are, some people who pooh-pooh at various types of social work, but when the people who do this see that the leading

law school in a community thinks enough of legal aid work to make a definite contract with the society carrying it on, it gives them food for thought and tends to stop some of the criticism which unintelligent and uninformed people make of social work. The legal clinic has made the Legal Aid Bureau more efficient, and it has made a group of young professional people conversant with the needs of and demand for free legal service and the way in which the demand is being met.

How does it help the student? I believe it helps him in his legal education. A law student can learn by actually going out and doing something on a real case, following through the processes of arbitration or litigation, as well as by reading cases. He takes part in real practice in the court. In the second place, the law students get information about the community in which they live, information which many of them would not otherwise obtain. Many young attorneys, when they graduate from law school, go into large offices where they specialize in certain types of legal work. Few have to do with the municipal court. They perhaps go into offices which handle corporation cases, or patent law, etc., but as for the domestic relations courts, the small claims courts, in which the poor are interested, they come into little or no contact with them. The legal clinic affords these young law students an opportunity to observe the practice of law as it relates to the poor. That is worth while in itself, for when they go out to practice their profession their legal ethics will be higher and they will be better citizens. Anything that adds to their knowledge of the world tends to make them better lawyers and also better citizens. Every once in a while-nay, quite ofteninjustice is found.

Many of us feel that the greatest agitator in the world is injustice, and the people who represent the bar should feel this as strongly as social workers do. Should we not do everything in our power to see that young professional people in their professional training are given the opportunity to see the conditions which exist in the communities in which they live? Through the legal clinic the Senior law students of a great university are required to give ninety hours a week out in the field, where they can see the courts and the way in which law is administered, and they see both justice and injustice. I want all of you to read the book "Justice and the Poor," written for the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching, by Reginald Heber Smith, who was formerly with the Boston Legal Aid Society. I believe it is for free distribution. It is the last word on legal aid work in this country.

Postscript by John H. Wigmore, Dean, Northwestern University School of Law, Chicago

I am thankful that Superintendent Hunter was available to take my place on the subject assigned to me; for his description of the new movement is clear and convincing.

The legal clinic is soon destined to play the large and useful part, in getting justice for the helpless, that the medical clinic has long played in relief to the sick and injured. As a measure in legal education its utility is as obvious as in medical education. But even more is it destined to benefit the social hospital in the same way that it has so enormously aided the work of the medical hospital. Every metropolis teems with abuses and injustices which seem petty to the comfortable citizen, but are potent causes of distress and social unrest to the humble and helpless. The legal clinic enables the services of the social relief agencies to be multiplied, and supplies a type of service which rounds out their function. By long tradition, the bar owes the duty to the public to aid the poor man's cause gratuitously. This duty, which to a large extent

GENERAL SESSIONS

has existed in name only, will once more become a reality on a large scale. The social duty of the lawyer will be impressed upon him at the outset of his career. And the fullest aid of government and law can now be organized for those who need it most of all, to an extent limited only by the number of schools that join in the good cause.

AFTER-CARE FOR INDUSTRIAL COMPENSATION CASES

Frances Perkins, Secretary, Council on Immigrant Education, Formerly Member of the
New York State Industrial Commission, New York City

on

I have been thinking that the fates which control our destinies have a sense of humor when they assign to me the topic on which I have been asked to speak this evening. I have been a social worker ever since I left college, yet the first time I have been asked to speak on the program of the social workers' convention I am asked to speak case work." I have never been a case worker. The fact is, I have all my life been one of that somewhat ardent group committed to the belief that if we could give people opportunity, poverty would disappear and people could look after themselves and manage their own affairs without the activities of a social case worker. However, when I was appointed to a real job on the New York State Industrial Commission circumstances made me a convert to the value of case work. However, it is not only this experience which has brought about a change in my attitude, but also my own deeper experience in life. For as I have regarded the operation of social work generally, it has seemed to me that the thing we are all striving for has been to modify the environment in which we live so that it should be favorable to the development of the best things in human beings. I have been challenged by the perfectly obvious fact that in the last fifty or a hundred years our environment has changed enormously. We cannot expect human beings suddenly to adapt themselves perfectly to this new mechanistic environment, that has come about as the result of industrial development. I suppose it is the introduction of the automobile, the telephone, and more and more of machinery into the household, which has brought to me strikingly the realization that many human beings, even social workers, have not yet perfectly adapted themselves to the mechanistic era in which we live. I find I do not like to cross the street under the present conditions of automobile traffic. You know, doubtless, as I do, many people who cannot bring themselves to hold a telephone conversation. So I have sympathy with the idea that there may be a great many human beings who are not perfectly adapted to the environment in which they find themselves, and need some help in adjusting themselves to this environment. This I hold to be the real function of the social case worker.

I was appointed to the State Industrial Commission because I was a social worker but not because of any activities as a case worker. I had been in social work that was preventive in its aims and general in its application rather than individual. Our work was directed at prevention of fire and industrial accidents, and at other conditions that made for industrial ills. This work had gained some popular and legislative support and because of this preventive social activity I seemed to the governor a suitable appointee to the Industrial Commission. I thought of this new work merely as a greater opportunity, a larger field for exercising these same preventive activities.

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Imagine my surprise on finding in just the first week of my duties that I was becoming an amateur, rather awkward case worker. The commission, among other duties, administers the workingmen's compensation law. After a week of attempting to act as judge in these cases I realized that in many cases something more was needed than a decision to make or deny an award according to the letter of the law. All sorts of complications appeared not covered by the law, and the only thing to do was to call upon the social resources of the community to meet an individual need or problem. My knowledge of the resources of the community was limited and I found myself wishing many times for a good old-fashioned case worker who would know everything and do anything that needed to be done.

There were four cases that first week. One was the case of an old woman who claimed her husband had been killed in an accident. Nobody had seen the accident and there was a question as to whether the man died as a result of the accident or whether he died from natural causes. The commission held he died from the accident. The insurance company held that he died from natural causes and refused to pay the claim. The case had been dragging for months and it was proposed now to take it to the highest court of the state. Mrs. Smith appeared before our commission and in the midst of the hearing the poor old woman fainted and was brought into my office to recover. I inquired into the matter and found she had not had anything to eat for some time. The case had been dragging on till her savings were gone. She had been "poor but proud" and would not go for charity, so she fainted from exhaustion and hunger and the excitement. I knew enough to know that in New York City nobody need go hungry, so I got a local charity organization society headquarters on the wire, and Mrs. S. was fixed up for the night. I knew, however, that that did not solve Mrs. S's problem, and I had sense enough to turn to the local charity organization society and ask them to look after Mrs. S. for the time being and perhaps forever. Mrs. S. did get her compensation money finally and will have it now for the rest of her lifetime, but the charity organization society had to look after her for several months while the case was in the courts.

The next case was different. It was that of a girl who had been injured in an accident in a carpet factory where she had been running an elevator. The first day on the elevator job she had a terrible accident. Both legs were broken, and in fact almost everything happened to her that could and she still be alive. She got well unexpectedly and made her claim for compensation. She had taken this elevator job at a low wage and the rate of compensation had to be figured on this rate and therefore amounted to but six dollars a week.

Upon her recovery she came to the commission for a hearing. We learned that her father had died since her injury, and she claimed that with his death her last means of support had been taken away. She could not live on six dollars a week, and something must be done. Her hands were all right, but she could not walk, and she could not stand for five minutes at a time. She had worked since she was fourteen years old at a loom. Her fingers were swollen and coarse and incapable of fine work. Three of the commissioners sat together over the case. The fatherly commissioner proceeded to give her good advice. He thought it would be nice if she could become a milliner. The commission was in the habit of doing justice, and when the sympathies were deeply touched it was a temptation to give kindly, well-meant, if inexpert, advice. When claimants had received justice, and when we had been kind, the applicant disappeared,

and out of sight was out of mind. But Helen Jones was a burden on my mind, so again I turned to a case work agency. I called up another branch of the charity organization society, asking them to go to visit her and try to make some analysis of her problem and plan for the future. They found she had a good many resources. They found she had a married sister living in the town where the carpet mill was, and that the family, because of long years of employment had some claim to the attention of the people who owned the carpet mill. It was arranged to have Helen go to live with that sister and the management of the mill was persuaded to give her an easy job, which she could do sitting down. Thus again a case worker came to my aid.

The next day I had on my calendar a case of another girl, a young and pretty girl who had lost her arm. She was only seventeen years old and, as a minor, was entitled to certain special consideration in the way of having the rate of compensation raised. She had lost her arm in operating a printing press. She had recovered when her claim came before the commission and in a very short time would be ready for an artificial arm. She had about six thousand dollars coming to her under the compensation law, to be paid over a period of several years. It seemed to me terrible for this young, lovely girl of seventeen to be turned back to society without an arm, and with this large sum of money, and with no plans for her future. She was without relatives and was living in a boarding house. I found the Young Women's Christian Association willing to do something for her, and persuaded her to go there to live and return to high school. After two years she would be ready for the normal school. She had real brains and ability. She is still there and doing well. She is going into the honorable teaching profession in which she can be successful and in which the loss of an arm will not be a disability. Her compensation money will be enough to cover the costs of this rehabilitation of a young worker. Here again I had to call in a group of specialized workers to help a young girl over a special difficulty.

In a few weeks I found myself sending too many cases to the charity organization society. These cases in my opinion were the responsibility of the state, not a private organization. Then began to appear certain other problems that related to the individual lives of our applicants—confidential cases where the people were not objects of charity, and I felt we had no right to betray their confidence and put their secrets into the hands of other people. And then came other cases where, to be of assistance, a case worker would have to have intensive knowledge of the compensation law as applied to the individual case. In one case I asked the charity organization society to make a very intensive investigation to get certain legal evidence in regard to a case in which our commission had voted three to one against making an award. I felt there were facts we had not found out and if those facts came out, there would be legal evidence upon which to make an award. So I asked the charity organization society to make the investigation. This worker did not know anything about the compensation law and had to bone up on the fine points in order to know which evidence was pertinent and acceptable. Finally she dug up some people who lived in the house with the injured man, and the parish priest. It took a very skillful and patient case worker to get together the evidence. After about six weeks we had the evidence that led the commission to reopen the case and make an award which the court sustained. All to the account of a case worker.

I began to realize that I was calling on the local case work agencies too often and felt that the time had come when the commission itself ought to have within its own