National Equal Justice Library Oral History Collection Interview with Allan Rodgers Conducted by Lonnie Powers November 14, 1990 Call number: NEJL-009 National Equal Justice Library Georgetown University Law Library 111 G Street NW Washington, DC 20001 Tel: (202) 662-4043 Fax: (202) 662-9911 Transcripts are protected by copyright and permission to publish must be obtained from NEJL at Georgetown University Law Library. Please contact the NEJL for more information. National Equal Justice Library Oral History Collection Interview with Allan Rodgers (AR) Conducted by Lonnie Powers (LP) November 14,1990 L.P.: So why don't you talk a minute, Allan, so we can check the sound. Give us your name and your age and where you went to school. A.R.: All right. I'm Allan Rodgers. I'm now fifty-five years of age. I went to school at Princeton University and Harvard Law School; graduated in 1962; went into private practice, because there were almost no public sector jobs at that point, with a Boston law firm and did mostly litigation for around six years. I found myself doing a lot of civil rights activities on the outside and enjoying that a lot. And the firm I was with previously had done a lot of litigation, had less and less litigation and more corporate work, which I did not enjoy, although I tried it. So, I decided to make a move to -- first to the Attorney General's office, to do litigation, mostly appellate work. Did that for about six months. And then was recruited out of the Attorney General's office to come run a new program which had just been started: the Massachusetts Law Reform Institute, by Al Kramer, who was the first director of Mass. Law Reform, when they got the OEO grant. And Al was leaving Mass. Law Reform to become the chief policy advisor to a Republican governor in Massachusetts named Francis Sargent. L.P.: Talk a little bit more about Al and his role in starting Mass. Law Reform. A.R.: Al Kramer was a Democrat from Chelsea, grew up in Chelsea the hard way; became a state representative from Chelsea; and in the 1960s, served several terms in the legislature. And then came to what was then Voluntary Defenders Committee, which was a former public defender, a nonprofit organization started in the '30s that had stopped doing public defender work when the state took over the public defender activities in the early 1960s. And 1 during the 1960s, Voluntary Defenders got a number of foundation grants and did quite a lot of research on criminal and civil law justice issues, including issues of bail, juvenile justice, and the like. Al was part of a one-person, two-person staff that staffed the Voluntary Defenders Committee during the '60s until it received the OEO grant in 1968. And Al was a very astute public policy person. I think it's fair to say that under Governor Sargent, to whom he served as the chief policy advisor, he was one of the most influential insider policymakers. During that period of time, state government experimented a lot on new approaches to various age-old problems. For example, Jerry Miller was brought in, in effect, to put out of business the state training schools and some of the institutions for juveniles, which had been big problems for a long time. And Al had a significant amount of policy influence under a governor who can be characterized as a moderate-to-liberal Republican but had a number of conservative advisors as well. Al remained a friend, to this day, of the program. He was nominated to be a District Court judge in Quincy District Court in Massachusetts; has been the presiding justice in that court for many years and is well known to be an innovator of new programs for the courts, particularly emphasizing restitution and civil and social services to defendants in criminal cases. L.P.: So Al recruited you, you said, to take over for him? A.R.: Yes. L.P.: And when was that, when you started? A.R.: That was early in 1969. I actually arrived in March. He had taken the job with Governor Sargent in January of 1979, when he and the board of the Voluntary Defenders Committee were recruiting, essentially, an executive director to take over. I should go back to 1968, though, to the start of the OEO grant, which was for a state support center. And just briefly, before we get to describe that grant and the concept, Mass. Law 2 Reform -- or the Voluntary Defenders Committee, as it was then known -- received this federal grant at almost the last minute in June of 1968. The federal fiscal year ran out, at that point, in June. And if money wasn't committed to grants, it went back to the U.S. Treasury. So all of a sudden, without very much notice, Voluntary Defenders Committee became a state support center for Massachusetts with this grant. Al hired about four or five new staff members during the course of that first half-year. And when I arrived in March of 1969, those staff members were all in place. They had started various kinds of activities. But it was up to us -- those of us who were coming in -- to really shape what the state support center was to do from then on. L.P.: How many programs were there in Massachusetts' Legal Services Programs at that time? A.R.: There was a whole hodge-podge of programs. It's a little hard to characterize them. They got started wherever OEO could come in and find a local bar association who would tolerate them. Many of those programs were run through community action programs, and many of them covered the same service territories as community action. So, for example, you had a program in Brockton that covered the program territory of Self-Help, which was the CAP program there. But it covered parts of four counties. And numerous court systems -- and so I know -- I went down there a number of times to talk to the staff. And it turned out that they spent much of their time on the road, going between courthouses. They had four sets of probate courts and seven or eight sets of district courts to cover. And most of their activity was in court. And so the service jurisdictions didn't make a lot of sense, in many cases. There were programs, for example that covered only parts of the state. For example, there was a program in 3 Springfield. There was one in Chicopee/Holyoke, but there was no program in the rest of the western part of the state. Similarly, in Worcester County, there was program in Worcester, which covered just the city, and a small program in Northern Worcester and Fitchburg, which covered really just Fitchburg and Leominster, but the whole rest of that county was uncovered. So it was very much a spotty thing. And there must have been something like fifteen different programs, at that point. L.P.: Whose idea was it to have a state support office in Massachusetts? A.R.: This was a combination. I think probably the person who emanated the idea was Vaughan Gearan. Vaughan Gearan was in the New York office of OEO, at that point. He was a native of Fitchburg, Massachusetts, a former mayor of Fitchburg in his youth. He ran a community action program in Fitchburg when they first started in the early to mid-1960s. And then he went down to be in the regional office of OEO, which at that time served not only New York, but New England. And Vaughan was responsible for funding a lot of the legal services programs. He was a lawyer by training, and he had a strong interest in that. He, I think, looked at the hodge-podge of programs -- very small programs with very little capacity to do major legal work -- and said to himself, “We need some coordinative device to bring those programs together. And we need some program that will take a look at the bigger picture and will take a look at the statewide needs of clients and provide for statewide representation.” And so he, more than anybody, conceived of the idea of having a state support center. In addition to that, there were several other people who were heavily involved, all of whom are still around. One is Bob Spangenberg. Bob, at that point, was the director of the Boston program. He had just started the Boston program in the late '60s. And he got together with a man named Bill Wells, who's a lawyer by training, but newspaper reporter and advisor to presidents of colleges. He's now 4 retired. And Bill and Bob Spangenberg, and a couple of other people, sat down. And legend has it that they were out at a restaurant one night with Al Kramer, and they wrote down on a napkin the outlines of what was to become Mass. Law Reform. At our twentieth anniversary party in 1988, they denied that that was what really happened, and said they were a little more organized than that. One of the things that happened when I came into Mass. Law Reform in 1968 -- where it was in an office at 80 Boylston Street, I looked in the supply cupboard, and I saw on the shelves there these piles of documents. And I said, “What is this?” And so I took a look at them and they were all of the appendices that they had prepared for the original grant application for the state support center at Mass. Law Reform. And they must have been about six inches thick. What they did is they took every conceivable document that they could lay their hands on that illustrated what a state support center could do, including pleadings in litigation, and drafts of legislative bills, and other kinds of ideas. And they plopped them all into this application. But basically the application -- it's very interesting -- described what a state support center should do. And that was really drafted by Bill Wells and Bob Spangenberg, and several other people, with, of course, advice from Vaughan Gearan. And this was drafted during the spring of 1968. And if you look at that draft and that outline, it almost exactly mirrors what state support centers do these days. In other words, the kinds of functions that they describe, the value of having statewide coordination and sharing of information, sharing of activities to avoid duplication, and the necessity to have a statewide focus for advocacy for clients. It was all in there; very far-seeing. And what happened -- the process was that they had drafted this application because Vaughan Gearan showed an interest in this and had talked with them about it and had it 5 available. And the story goes that about June 29, in 1968, a call came from Vaughn Gearan in New York, “Hey, we got some money: 220,000 dollars. You know, send me down an application, and we'll fund it.” And so they -- by whatever express mail they had then -- they quickly sent down, by overnight mail, this pile of paper that they had accumulated. And Vaughan Gearan funded it the next day, before the five o'clock deadline. I'll also give you another story that's somewhat amusing. At the same time, the same year, Vaughan Gearan tried to get a center started in Connecticut. And he contacted a lawyer -- whose name I'm not going to tell you about -- who was kind of a civil rights lawyer, and got that lawyer to agree to put together a similar application. And the lawyer was going to incorporate a nonprofit organization. Well, the lawyer didn't quite get around to filing the papers on time, and so what happened was Vaughn Gearan funded a Connecticut state support center, but then what happened was somebody inquired about what this center was, and it turned out that they hadn't filed the papers. And so the headline in the local paper was: “OEO funds phantom center.” And immediately the game was up. They withdrew the grant. And to this day, Connecticut has never had a state support center. It has, now, a small amount of state support money. But once that chance was lost, no further funding was available to do something similar in Connecticut. L.P.: I believe you said that the grant application was developed in the spring of '69. You meant the spring of '68? A.R.: Yes, '68. L.P.: So Bob Spangenberg, that you mentioned, is now director of -- or runs the Spangenberg program? 6 A.R.: That's right. Bob was with the Boston program through the late '70s. And then he went to Abt & Associates, a consulting firm, and did consulting mostly on criminal justice and court issues. And now he has his own consulting firm and is kind of the leader of legal needs studies across the country. L.P.: Right. A.R.: He's done a lot of other work for NLADA. So he's definitely kept his hand in it. L.P.: And where is Vaughn Gearan now? A.R.: Vaughn Gearan stayed with OEO and OEO Legal Services. Once the Legal Services Corporation was established in 1974 and '75, he was in the regional office for many years there. And then when the new people came in, in the early '80s, he left. And he turned up as the deputy director of Westchester Legal Services. And he was there for many years as the deputy. And he came up to our twentieth anniversary celebration in November of 1988. He now has left. And, as I understand it, does not have a fixed job. The Westchester Legal Services changed directors recently. And I understand it, Vaughan essentially was reorganized out of a job there because the new director wanted a litigation director instead of an administrative director. And so at the present time, I'm told Vaughan is looking around for new things to do. But -- L.P.: Well, I'm sure he'll be successful. You said that the original application contemplated that state support would do essentially the same task that they're doing now. It might be helpful if you talked a little bit about what those are, or what those were, in -- A.R.: Yes. First of all, the advocacy -- there was strong push towards doing statewide advocacy, which would include legislative advocacy. After all, Al Kramer, who took part in this, was a former legislator. And he recognized the importance of being active in legislature. It 7 included activities with state agencies, federal agencies whose policies affect clients. It included litigation coordination and major litigation, which could be undertaken by the state support center, most likely in coordination with, and sometimes as, co-counsel with the local programs. It included the idea of task forces. That is, getting together people in certain subject areas or to perform certain functions and sharing information that way. It, of course, included all of the written materials that a state support center might do, such as manuals and practice materials and how to do it. It included a research component, so that the state support center would be able to do research and help local advocates with their cases. It included advice and training. Almost all of the activities that you can think of that we have now catalogued, ad nauseam, were contained in one way or another in that original proposal. L.P.: You indicated that there were four or five staff people at the time you took over Mass. Law Reform. Are any of them still around? A.R.: They're still around. I can tell you pretty much who the major ones were. There was Mike Feldman. Mike Feldman was very much of a tiger on -- particularly on -- court misbehavior. Had a number of lawsuits against judges for misbehavior, including a famous case against Judge Jerome Troy, who was the scourge of the Dorchester District Court, who was later relieved of his duties because of corruption. Mike went from our office to be a staff attorney at Greater Boston Legal Services, under Bob Spangenberg. And then went to become the director of Pine Tree Legal Assistance in Maine in the late '70s and early '80s. And now still lives in Maine on a farm and practices law, as I understand it, privately. Larry Kotin was another lawyer, K-O-T-I-N. He came from New York. He was an education specialist. And he had a lot to do with the development of the special education law and regulations in Massachusetts, including -- in our work, at that time, was a piece of litigation challenging the at-large election of the Boston 8 School Committee on the grounds that it tended to disenfranchise minority voters. That case was never pursued to conclusion. The clients decided, after a number of years, that they had other avenues they wanted to pursue. Larry went from our office into private practice on his own, and now he heads a growing law firm called Kotin, Crabtree & Strong. One of his partners, Jim Wexler, who was formerly at the Boston program, is on our board now. And Larry and I still sit on the board of the Massachusetts Advocacy Center, which does educational and children's advocacy. So Larry is still very much in the field and practicing in Boston. Let's see. Alex Kovell did housing work. He left us and went to work for a state agency. And then to one of the Boston law firms. And I think he's pretty much in practice on his own in Boston, right now. So we've kind of lost track of Alex. So those were the major new staff members, at that point. And we added to the staff quite a bit. We had lots of VISTA volunteers. We had people who came in on a shoestring, and we had very small funding at that point. Another thing we did early on was that we attracted a very experienced litigator from New York named Mel Zarr. And he was with us -- he was my co-director, actually, while he was there. That was the arrangement we did. And Mel did a lot of major litigation. He came from the Legal Defense Fund in New York. And then he left after about three years, to teach at the University of Maine Law School, and he still teaches there, constitutional law and federal courts, and the like. He's living in Portland. Just a year after I came, Tony Winsor came into Mass. Law Reform, and Tony is still there. Tony was a recruit from Hale and Dorr, one of the Boston law firms. He was a year after me in law school, and he did a lot of litigation. And he came in, and he took charge of areas like consumer, administrative law, litigation assistance, and the like. And more recently, he's become a specialist in disability law. And he has spent a lot of time building up a very significant 9