National Support Centers
Recently, the LSTech e-mail list had a brief, but interesting, conversation about the National Support Centers. I put the e-mails aside with the hope of later writing a more thorough post on their history. Unfortunately, tonight, when I got a chance to do some research, I wasn't able to find a lot of information.
The story that I can put together from the resources that I did find:
The National Support Centers were funded by the Legal Services Corporation (LSC) to support legal services programs by creating materials, litigating on strategic cases, advocating before legislatures and Congress, and building a community of advocates knowledgeable about specific areas of law. During the Reagan era, a lot of Republicans didn't like federal money supporting legal aid and "think tanks for the radical left." While Reagan and his supporters didn't succeed in completely killing off LSC, they did get rid of funding for the National Support Centers. The National Support Centers had to turn to other funding sources to continue.
So, for those of you who lived through it, how did I do? What did I get wrong? Are there resources that I missed? - K
