Introduction

CBS's advertisement in Variety touted that its new series for the fall 1970 season, The Storefront Lawyers, would “capture the whole spirit of an exciting, significant movement.” The ad assumed readers would know what this movement was. It wasn't an unreasonable assumption. The movement – the “exciting, significant” movement – had been building over the course of a decade. Beginning in the early years of the 1960s, when lawyers became involved in large numbers with the direct action phase of the civil rights movement, and growing exponentially with the creation of the Legal Services Program, this movement only continued to expand and grow in the later years of the decade. This cause lawyering “explosion” – as I have elsewhere labeled it – neared its zenith in 1970. As the sixties became the seventies, more and more legal professionals were involved in battles against the war in Vietnam, racism, and sexism, as well as with such issues as civil liberties, consumer rights, the environment, and government accountability.

The explosion was the product of an era in which people were questioning the fundamental assumptions of American life and institutions. Many have noted the ways the sixties constituted a period of inquiry about structures of race, of sexuality, of modernity. But the sixties also marked the period in which assumptions about law, lawyers, and the legal profession – law's role in democratic society, lawyers' relationships with clients and to social change, and the legal profession's definitions of how attorneys should do their work – came up for debate and challenge.