About | HeinOnline Law Journal Library | HeinOnline Law Journal Library | HeinOnline



14 La. L. Rev. 554 (1953-1954)
Legal Aid: Its Concept, Organization and Importance

handle is hein.journals/louilr14 and id is 566 raw text is: LOUISIANA LAW REVIEW

Modification of contracts by the original parties thereto is
a common occurrence in every branch of the law. It would be
indeed strange to deny it to the contractual relationship between
landowner and servitude owner. Articles 748 and 752 of the Code
clearly contemplate adjustments by the original contracting
parties. The following brief statement from the highest court
of the state should brave logical contradiction in law and equity
and give heart particularly to the landowner. [T]here is no law
prohibiting the landowner and the mineral owner from enter-
ing into a contract with each other, as was done by and between
these litigants, whereby a division or a reduction of the servitude
results.37
Legal Aid
ITS CONCEPT, ORGANIZATION AND IMPORTANCE
John S. Bradway*
Legal aid work' essentially is a state of the individual lay
mind, an individual professional point of view, and the answer
of the organized bar to a public demand for a means for imple-
menting some of the basic legal principles undergirding the
American way of life. This activity is carried on generally in a
material framework of law office, bricks, mortar, desks, filing
cabinets, and books. But at the center of the concept there are
always a client asking help and a lawyer giving it. Functionally
37. 69 So.2d 734, 735 (La. 1954).
* Professor of Law, Duke University; Director Legal Aid Clinic, Duke
University.
1. Elihu Root, writing in 1919 the Foreword to Reginald Heber Smith,
Justice and the Poor, CARNEGIE FOUNDATION FOR THE ADVANCEMENT OF TEACHING,
Bull. No. 13, p. ix (1919), saves us the trouble of a long series of references
by summarizing the circumstances which in this country brought the need
for legal aid to public attention. He says: We have had in the main just
laws and honest courts to which people-poor as well as rich-could repair
to obtain justice. But the rapid growth of great cities, the enormous masses
of immigrants (many of them ignorant of our own language), and the
greatly increased complications of life have created conditions under which
the provisions for obtaining justice which were formerly sufficient are suffi-
cient no longer.
Vance, The Historical Background of the Legal Aid Movement, 124
ANNALS 6 (1926), makes clear that the need was one continuing through the
development of Western Civilization.

[VOL. XIV