“Most Americans don’t realize that you can have your home taken away, your children taken away and you can be a victim of domestic violence but you have no constitutional right to a lawyer to protect you.”
JAMES J. SANDMAN, president of the Legal Services Corporation.

Supplemental Security Income (SSI) benefits for low-income disabled children are back in the news, in part because of a recent New York Times column by Nicholas Kristof. Unfortunately, the program is being subject to some sharp criticism that is based on misunderstanding of key issues related to SSI for poor children with disabilities.  Discussion and debates concerning this program should be rooted in facts and data, not impressions, misimpressions, and anecdotes.  Here, we present basic facts about the program and try to clear up some significant misunderstandings.

Millions of Americans face eviction every year. But legal aid to the poor, steadily starved since the Reagan years, has been decimated during the recession. The result? In many housing courts around the country, 90 percent of landlords are represented by attorneys and 90 percent of tenants are not. This imbalance of power is as unfair as the solution is clear.

Now autistic children enrolled in the government-subsidized Medicaid program in Washington will have access to ABA therapy.

Attorneys in Clark County have offered free legal advice on civil issues for decades. But since the economic recession hit four years ago, the calls to Clark County’s Volunteer Lawyers Program have doubled, officials say.

The Northwest Justice Project (NJP) is charged with creating a series of instructive videos for WashingtonLawHelp.org through the federal Communities Connect Network Project (part of the Department of Commerce’s Broadband Technology Opportunity Program) which aims to increase access to technology and improve legal literacy for unrepresented Washingtonians.

While President Obama and Gov. Romney battle for the hearts and minds of the middle class this election season, there’s a huge swath of Americans that are largely ignored. It’s the poor, and their ranks are growing.

Into the maelstrom of debate over whether Medicaid should cover more people comes a new study by Harvard researchers who found that when states expanded their Medicaid programs and gave more poor people health insurance, fewer people died.