Legal Aid in Mental Hospitals

This report on the experience of five in-hospital legal aid projects and one community-based project for the deinstitutionalized examines the workloads of the lawyers and paralegals who labor in this setting and the various approaches and predispositions they bring to the job or learn while they are at it. The caseloads as well as interviews and observations reveal enormous differences in approach from project to project. The work of some lawyers and their aides confirms the utility and importance of making legal aid directly available to patients on the hospital grounds. But the experience of a couple of other projects warns that certain styles of lawyering can be counterproductive and damaging. In general, lawyers in the mental hospital setting must avoid the legalistic and overly adversarial approach to the problems that are brought to them—many of which are of uncertain legal content, credibility, or psychological makeup. Lawyers must also be careful not to have their own legal priorities get in the way of the best interests of their patient-clients or even those of the hospital as a total institution. The best approach to lawyering in the institutional setting is one that softens the "traditional" legal and adversarial aspects in favor of a more mediatory stance in which fact finding, counseling, and the resolution of issues by compromise are dominant functions. And significant legal attention should be devoted to each of the major categories of problems faced by patients—commitment-discharge, institutional, and civil—if the institutional lawyer's credibility and effectiveness are to be maintained both with the patients and the staffs in charge of their treatment and custody.     

URLTA in Operation: An Introduction

The following articles examine the impact of legislation modeled after the Uniform Residential Landlord and Tenant Act (URLTA) in Portland, Oregon, and Cleveland, Ohio. Their conclusion is that the legislation has been only marginally effective, benefiting primarily middle-income tenants in the suburbs or in the cities' better neighborhoods, while largely failing in the aim of helping the inner-city poor and upgrading the quality of slum housing. The general lesson is an old one: law reform attempts at rearranging basic social-legal relationships often fail to achieve their intended effects, particularly when their effectuation is left to the initiative or ingenuity of those individual private parties who are least likely to possess or display these traits.     

The effects of modeling and cognitive induction on the moral reasoning of adolescents

In this investigation of the effects of modeling and cognitive induction on moral reasoning, 87 junior high school students were exposed to moral reasoning, characteristic of either one stage above (+1) or one stage below (?1) their dominant stage, as determined by pretesting. The presented reasoning was attributed to a model of either high, neutral, or low status/relevance to the content of the moral dilemmas used. A multiple-choice adaptation of the Kohlberg moral development interview was used at pretesting, at intervention/posttesting, and at delayed posttesting. Analyses of changes in moral reasoning included examination of direct and indirect effects on both an immediate and a delayed posttest. Results indicated significant and stable change in moral reasoning associated with the developmental stage of the message (+1 produced advances, but ?1 failed to induce significant regression) and significant temporary change associated with the characteristics of the model (high status/relevance models had greater influence than did neutral models). It is suggested that future research and educational efforts give attention to both the moral stage of the intervention and the nature of the source to which it is attributed.