Three days after his death in 1993, Thurgood Marshall’s casket lay in state in the Great Hall of the Supreme Court. Speaking at a memorial service, Columbia Law School professor Eben Moglen, a former Marshall clerk, noted that the mourners had come through doors above which the Court promised “Equal Justice Under Law.” Later, Chief Justice William Rehnquist said of his late colleague, and rightly so, that “no other individual had done more to make those words reality.”
But, as Marshall often and caustically used to say, the promise of Gideon v. Wainwright (1963) and its subsequent line of cases has yet to become a reality for huge and growing numbers of poor, working-class, and even many middle-class Americans. Some American Bar Association studies suggest that as much as 80 percent of the legal needs of low-income Americans aren’t being met.
