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The interview, which runs about 25 minutes, is here.

A common refrain I hear among alternate-legal service supporters, is that it is better for a person to have less-than-perfect legal services (that is, not provided by a lawyer) than to have no legal services at all. Is this the case?

A friend who works in the area told me that in most cases, it is better for poor people to die intestate, and let the state’s intestacy statute take care of the estate, than to have a will that does not accurately describe all of a person’s property, or messes up who gets what. He noted that a will with errors would lead to much litigation, that could dissipate smaller estates. Distributing according to the intestacy statute would be cheaper.

I pose this question to readers out of curiosity. How often will it be the case that a person, who could not afford a licensed lawyer, will be better off having no access to legal services, rather than obtaining legal services from a non-lawyer (this could be LegalZoom, a form book, or maybe a “limited-licensed technician“)? I’m not talking about criminal matters. Rather, I am focusing on the sets of smaller, civil matters that people often try to obtain through self-help (or think could be performed by non-lawyers). Wills are usually the most common example. What other examples are there?

Somewhat related, is the study that showed that people who relied on legal aid from Harvard Law School were actually worse off in certain circumstances:

Specifically, the offers of representation came from a law school clinic, which provided high-quality and well-respected assistance in administrative “appeals” to state ALJs of initial rulings regarding eligibility for unemployment benefits (these “appeals” were actually de novo mini-trials). Our randomized evaluation found that the offers of representation from the clinic had no statistically significant effect on the probability that an unemployment claimant would prevail in the “appeal,” but that the offers did delay proceedings by (on average) about two weeks. Actual use of representation (from any source) also delayed the proceeding; we could come to no firm conclusions regarding the effect of actual use of representation (from any source) on the probability that claimants would prevail. Keeping in mind the high-quality and well-respected nature of the representation the law school clinic offered and provided, we explore three possible explanations for our results, each of which has implications for delivery of legal services.

I should caveat this post with an obvious point–there are plenty of bad lawyers. Plenty of lawyers draft wills that are defective. What the impact of driving down the cost of legal services has on the quality of legal services is an important question. And whether limited-licensed lawyers would provide systematically worse services, compared to full-lawyers, is an even more important question.

Update: This article by I. Glenn Cohen on rationing legal services is also on point.

It’s remarkable how, even almost four years after the law was enacted, and a year after the Supreme Court upheld the law, the GOP refuses to even legitimize it as “law.” It is still a “bill.”

In floor speeches, TV interviews and town halls, Republicans often refer to President Obama’s signature healthcare law either as “ObamaCare” or a healthcare “bill” — subtly implying that it’s not truly permanent.

“The bill is named after the president. Why wouldn’t the president want to be under the bill?” Sen. Mike Enzi (R-Wyo.) asked in a floor speech earlier this month, making the case that the president should get his healthcare through ObamaCare.

Conservatives in the Senate repeatedly called the law a bill last week as they tried to push their colleagues to embrace the possibility of a government shutdown over ObamaCare.

“The very people that this bill is supposed to be helping … are the people it is directly hurting,” Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) said during the 21-hour talk-a-thon led by Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas).

Sen. Rand Paul struck a similar note.

“Really, there are a host of problems and this bill does nothing to control costs,” he said, later adding “ObamaCare is 100 percent the president’s bill.

“I am very concerned that our country is going to suffer because some of our friends think they have to continue to support this dog of a bill,” Sen. Orrin Hatch (R-Utah) said on the Senate floor earlier this month.

Having followed the case as closely as I did, and after listening to statements made by Senators in the past few days, I still don’t think members of the Senate accept the passage of the law as legitimate. Recall, following the Christmas Eve vote, Senator Scott Brown was seated. The GOP thought at that point they could filibuster the law. Instead, the Democrats sent it straight to the House, and relied on the reconciliation process, which was not subject to the reconciliation process.

For example, here is Jeff Session’s comment during the “filibuster”:

I was here when everybody on the Republican side fought this legislation until Christmas Eve, when it was finally rammed through shortly before Scott Brown from Massachusetts could take office and kill it. That is how close it was. I know people disagree about how to deal with it, and I understand and respect people with differing visions, but I wanted to say the Senator’s leadership has served a valuable purpose tonight, and I am pleased to be able to support his effort.

In their minds, it should’ve been stopped with Scott Brown’s election. Of course, the GOP didn’t take the Senate in 2010, or in 2012, or the White House. There were plenty more times to kill the law. But, they still consider its passage illegitimate.

I’ve heard a lot of kooky ideas about why John Roberts voted the way they did. A number of people are convinced that the NSA wiretaps of the Chief were used to blackmail or extort him (not sure what the Chief’s role in appointing judges to the FISC court plays here). The craziest theory I heard was that the Roberts’s adoption of children was not done properly, and the powers-that-be threatened to reveal that and take his kids away. Do a google search for John Roberts NSA Blackmail. Remarkable!

Another constitutional angle! If this goes through (it won’t) this may moot Hobby Lobby:

House Republicans have added a measure aimed at limiting contraceptive coverage to the spending bill coming up for a vote Saturday night, a spokesman for Rep. Tim Huelskamp, R-Kansas, told CNN.

A senior House leadership aide confirmed that development.

The so-called “conscience clause” would allow employers and insurers to opt out of preventative care for women which they find objectionable on moral or religious grounds. That prominently includes birth control, which most insurers are required to provide for free under current Obamacare rules.

With this move, House Republican leaders would give any employer or group health plan the ability to opt out of contraception coverage for the next year. That time frame syncs up with the larger measure in which this is included: a one-year delay of Obamacare provisions not yet in effect.