Marshall Boarman

Marshall Boarman

Rescuer of the Legal

Services Corporation

Marshall I. Boarman, a career civil service officer with oversight responsibilities for the Legal Services Corporation from the Nixon through the Reagan administrations died Aug. 26 in Warrenton, of complications of diabetes. He was 79.

In Richard Nixon’s second term, Mr. Boarman was assigned the task of dismantling the Legal Services Corporation—a division of the Office of Economic Opportunity concerned with legal aid to the poor—then held in low repute by the White House as a holdover from Lydon Johnson’s “Great Society.”

However, Mr. Boarman sought to save the LSC by reforming it.

To that end, he prepared a series of controversial memoranda known as the “Boarman Papers”, which subsequently surfaced in leading media.

In them, he argued that legal aid lawyers should refrain from helping the poor as a class through changes in judicial interpretations of the law. Instead, he contended, the lawyers should focus on the relatively narrow legal problems of their individual clients.

“One of the most objectionable features of the Legal Services Corporation as it has operated in the past”, he declared, “was its penchant for putting causes ahead of cases, for using clients as mere vehicles to promote sweeping social and political change”. Mr. Boarman proposed that the LSC not be dismantled, but that its “backup centers” — federally financed advisory groups affiliated with universities and their law schools—should be transferred to an “in house” Washington office.

This idea was widely criticized by legal aid lawyers as tantamount to gutting the LSC, since the backup centers had provided much of the inspiration and guidance for test cases and classaction litigation of the 2,500 lawyers then employed by the Office of Legal Services in 900 neighborhood units throughout the country. Senator George McGovern bitterly attacked the Boarman proposals in a speech to the Senate, declaring that “under the curious rationale of making the program less political, (the proposals) would make (the LSC) more so, destroy its independence, and let political appointees decide when and how the rights of the poor may be asserted.”

Mr. Boarman rebutted these criticisms as both “unfair and demagogic.” The purpose of the new approach,” he wrote, “is, in fact, quite the opposite: to expand the volume and improve the quality of services to individual clients and thus t4p render the Legal Services Program as a whole less vulnerable to outside political pressures.”

A compromise solution— along the lines Boarman had outlined—was ultimately adopted as the sacrifice required to overcome conservative opposition in Congress to the LSC, which had hardened in acrimonious debate over the years.

In 1966, new limitations were placed upon LSC activities, which in any case had been restricted to civil legal cases.

More recently, Mr. Boarman had taken some satisfaction in President George W. Bush’s budget message to Congress for fiscal year 2002 in which the President asked for full funding of LSC, declaring that “I believe the LSC can play a valuable role in ensuring that poor families are not treated unfairly and illegally by landlords, creditors and others merely because they cannot afford legal representation.”

Mr. Boarman said that President Bush’s support has for all practical purposes ended the annual warfare in Congress over the future of the LSC.

Beyond his many years in the civil service in Washington D.C, Mr. Boarman was a professional philosopher, with special interests in medieval philos