"[1] LAA provides free legal services in the fields of child and family law, benefits, employment, health, elder, disabilities, consumer, housing, and civil rights to eligible individuals and families in the greater New Haven area.
Seeking a remedy, the government and private charitable organizations began to finance “neighborhood law offices” to accommodate the vast number of individuals requiring legal assistance.
At the ceremony, Supreme Court Justice Arthur Goldberg lauded the opening as “the start of a new process – a process which will expand the rule of law to all segments of the population.”[2] In 1965, when the federal government began funding legal services through the Office of Economic Opportunity, LAA was used as a model for more than 300 programs that were opened around the country.
LAA added attorneys (reaching a high of 30 lawyers) and opened additional neighborhood offices (for a total of seven).
However, in the early 1970s, large government funding cuts forced the LAA to reduce its staff and number of neighborhood offices.