Goldmark Award 2006 - Ada Shen-Jaffe

Acceptance Remarks - Ada Shen-Jaffe

Goldmark Distinguished Service Award Recipient - February 18th, 2005

Thanks to you, Bill, and to the Legal Foundation Board and staff, honored members of the Court, public officials, Bar and Community Leaders, treasured colleagues and friends----for this award, and for being here to share it with me.

I would like to dedicate this award to the clients we serve---for they inspire us with their courage in the face of adversity, barriers and obstacles we cannot imagine---in their efforts to seek justice; and also to the Staff, Volunteers, educators, law librarians, county clerks, Board members and equal justice partners who work so hard to help make our nation’s proclamations of “equal justice for all” a reality and not an empty, hollow promise.

Many years ago, when the Legal Foundation was brand new, Barbara Clark came to me with an idea---the Foundation would host an Annual Luncheon to honor Chuck Goldmark, and to celebrate the achievements of the Foundation’s grantees. I’m embarrassed to admit that, in far too glib a manner, I told her that I thought Chuck would rather we spent the money helping poor people, and I dubbed the idea “Barbara’s Folly”.

Well, thank goodness she ignored me, and followed her own best instincts. Thanks to Barbara’s wise vision, this Annual Goldmark Luncheon has become the statewide equal justice community’s most treasured opportunity to renew and rededicate itself to its broad equal justice vision.

One of the unique defining features of our equal justice community over the years has been its limitless capacity to indulge and support its members in the pursuit of what seem, initially, to be wild, fanciful and far-fetched ideas, or “follies”.

“Chuck Goldmark’s Folly” was his belief in a then-novel idea hatched by Florida Supreme Court Justice Arthur England as he desperately tried to find a way to rescue his legal aid programs from the devastating effects of federal funding cuts---the idea was to capture Interest on Lawyer’s Trust Accounts (IOLTA) to address the unmet civil legal needs of poor and vulnerable people. Thanks to Chuck and others, an IOLTA Rule was passed in Washington, and the Legal Foundation was established to administer the funds. This happened because Chuck forged ahead, undaunted, in the face of skepticism and opposition by the State Bar and several local bar associations. Bar leader and equal justice champion Wayne Blair once told me that he looks back with chagrin at the stance the organized bar took on the creation of the IOLTA program back in the early 1980’s.

Chuck Goldmark would later serve as a President of the Legal Foundation Board. I have thought so often over the years about Chuck, and I hope that he would be proud of the work that IOLTA funding has made possible, and that he would glory in the broad-based equal justice movement that would never have taken root without the leadership and support of the Legal Foundation of Washington.

Now you know about “Chuck’s Folly” and “Barbara’s Folly”----I’d like to share a few other important equal justice “follies” with you:

“The State Funding Folly”---- a 4-year-long effort, led by then State Representative now Court of Appeals Judge Marlin Appelwick, to secure state funding for civil indigent legal

Services---State funds have become a backbone of our delivery system;

“The Access to Justice Board Folly”---a four-year long effort to establish an institutional commitment to civil equal justice for poor and vulnerable people, based on a State Bar long-range planning committee report authored by Co-Chair Bill Gates, and led by State Bar Presidents Paul Stritmatter and Tom Chambers, now Justice Chambers. This effort resulted in the establishment of the Washington State Access to Justice Board, the first of its kind in the nation.

“The LAW Fund Folly”---a four-year long effort---(four years---do you see a pattern here?) to establish a statewide fundraising and resource development entity with leadership and support from founders such as the late, great Jack Dean of Spokane, Mark Hutcheson, Bill Gates, David Andrews, Kirk Dublin and Judge Susan Agid.

“The LPO (Limited Practice Officer) Folly”---another four year-long effort to expand the IOLTA Rule to include Limited Practice Officers---IOLTA revenues nearly doubled after the rule change. This effort was led by former ATJ Board Chair and former WSBA

Governor Ken Davidson (who was also a founding member of the Eastside Legal Assistance Program).

I’d like to turn now to the difficult challenges ahead and the “follies” I believe we will need to engage in to overcome them.

Make no mistake about it; poor people in our communities are in for unbelievably difficult and painful times. The very notion of justice is under serious attack by those who would dismantle it because it serves as an obstacle to unfair, unlawful and exploitive behavior and actions that would otherwise go unchecked and unfettered.

There are those who proudly proclaim that their goal is to shrink government down to a size so small that it can be “drowned in a bathtub”, or “disappeared altogether”. This is a time when we are in difficult a “tug of war” between those with a vision of government for the common good and the protection of the weak, those who believe that individual accomplishment is the most valid basis for achieving common societal good, and those who have grown too exhausted, cynical, confused or dispirited to know what to do to find a principled balance that does not do violence to the core values of our nation.

We as a nation reflect jarring and deeply troubling “disconnects” between our stated democratic ideals, economic, moral, social and political values and beliefs. These disconnects have our country polarized and deeply divided in a way that transcends any “Red States/Blue States” or “Red Counties/Blue Counties” maps.

Like a viewing public fragmented and Balkanized by hundreds of TV Stations blaring their programming at us “24/7”, we stand at great risk of losing our common center as a nation. Those who would relegate our government, our justice system, to a “no relevance” role believe that our nation is benefited when there is fragmentation, atomization and pulverization of common effort for the common good.

A few weeks ago, Retired Judge Horowitz and I were musing over the state of things, and the future of equal justice. I said I couldn’t believe that we could mobilize a war on terror, a massive clean up of the 9/11 Twin Towers site, and Tsunami relief on a scale never before seen on the planet, and yet could not seem to be able to summon up the collective will or traction to address persistent poverty, third rate health care and educational inequities, and discriminatory patterns of predatory lending and exploitation.

Much of this unmet need is reflected in the State Supreme Court’s Civil Legal Needs Study----a study that is an indictment, really, of our justice system’s inability to deliver on the promise of “equal justice for all”. As we have read in the papers, our criminal indigent defense systems are a disgrace in too many under-resourced communities. And our court system, although a co-equal branch of government with the legislative and executive branches, has gotten short budgetary shrift for far too long.

Judge Horowitz responded to my “tirade” by writing this quote, from William Butler Yeats’ poem, “The Second Coming” on a Starbuck’s napkin:

“Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all convictions, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.”

We in this room know that there is no common good when each instrument plays its own music, to its own beat, with no regard for the others.

We in this room know that the balancing dance between individual accomplishment and common achievement requires a deep commitment to the common good, and a great deal of effort that individual, autonomous and unfettered action does not demand.

We in this room know that the organic documents of our nation speak of a government that serves the common good and protects the weak.

Those of you who know me know that you will not be released from your seats without exhortation and a “call to action”. My “call to action” today is to enlist you in 4 current follies:

First, the “Justice in Jeopardy Initiative” led by our Chief Justice, his colleagues on the State Supreme Court, and our judicial leaders at the Board for Judicial Administration. This is a groundbreaking effort to coordinate a comprehensive linking strategy to address the three areas of chronic under-funding in our justice system:

• trial court funding;
• funding for criminal indigent defense; and
• civil legal aid funding.

It has taken tremendous leadership and courage to persuade distinct and disparate component parts of a system to lay down their individual short-term institutional interests in the common pursuit of the long-term health and welfare of the justice system as a whole.

This is the kind of transcendent leadership platform from which Judge Mary Kay Becker, a former State Legislator, was able to issue her challenge to the Legislature at a House Judiciary Committee Hearing last month-----she challenged the Legislature to have the courage to stand up and do right by justice in our state, and to thereby go down in history as a truly memorable Legislature, and not just another mediocre one.

Second, there is the “Civil Gideon” effort, based on the vision of Len Schroeder, to establish access to justice in essential civil matters as a “fundamental right”, much as access to justice is afforded as a matter of legal right to people too poor to afford legal counsel in criminal matters.

Third, there is an effective and empowering “Leadership Development Initiative” underway in our equal justice community;

And fourth, we have all embraced an initiative to ensure “Inclusion, Diversity and Multicultural Competence as a Justice Imperative” in our state.

Our so-called “follies” have had certain characteristics in common:

1. they were initially believed to be too daunting, or impossible to achieve;
2. they were audacious;
3. they took persistence and patience in the face of repeated rejection, initial skepticism and failure; and
4. most importantly----they took the combined, collaborative effort of hundreds of people, crossing partisan party lines and institutional boundaries – in the service of a common equal justice vision.

We have accomplished something truly great here in our State. We have built an equal justice movement based on a shared vision and values that transcend divisions and barriers. These core values permeate our community, and strengthen us. Because of this, with apologies to William Butler Yeats:

“Things will NOT fall apart;
The centre WILL hold;
And we will continue to be propelled by our strong conviction
And our passionate intensity in the service of justice.”

Thank you for your attention.