1 INTERVIEW SUBJECT: Frank Dineen INTERVIEW DATE: Not Stated TRANSCRIBER: Jodie Algarin TRANSCRIPTION DATE: September 12, 2023 2 MR. DINEEN: Our roots really go back to, I would say, 1963, and to some extent back to 1927, and I'll explain how we have these different roots and why one is '27 and one is '63, but let me start with 1962. In New Haven during the '50s and the '60s, urban redevelopment was a very big thing, and we had a mayor in New Haven, Richard C. Lee, who was mayor for many years and really was one of the national leaders in the whole field of urban redevelopment. He had a redevelopment team headed by Ed Logue who was nationally famous and went to Boston after New Haven, went to New York after Boston. But as a team, they were able to get all kinds of federal assistance and money in an effort to redevelop New Haven, and an enormous amount of work was done and neighborhoods were removed, people were relocated, a lot of new buildings were erected. The landscape in New Haven changed dramatically, but there was a concern at that time and for some time about what's happening to the people. While all this urban renewal is going on, where are the people going and what's happening to these low-income neighborhoods that were sort of vital prior to being destroyed? Where are those people going and what's happening on the human scale? And in 1962, the Ford Foundation got very much 3 interested in this problem and decided it was going to spend money on what they called human renewal as opposed to urban renewal. Now, this was the counterplot to deal with the other part of the problem, what was happening to the people, and so they funded programs in several parts of the country. There are a total of about five programs. New York had one, Boston had one, Washington, D.C., had one. There was one out in California. I'm not sure where the fifth was, but there were five of these programs. In New Haven, that program was called Community Progress, Inc., and the goal of the program was to create a catalytic organization that would have a dramatic effect on social service agencies in the community, in a sense of improving the quality of their work, enlarging the scope of their work and making them more responsive to people and to the clientele that they were supposed to serve. The program itself was not essentially designed to be a service provider, but it was designed to change the mechanisms of many service providers and to enlarge and improve them. Although, in fact, it did both. It provided service and was very much involved in trying to improve social service agencies. At the time that that organization, Community 4 Progress, Inc., was being created, there was a member of the faculty at the Yale Law School who was a Ford Foundation consultant, and his name was Joe Goldstein. He was a teacher of mine, a mentor of mine, a very good friend of mine; and they turned to him, the Ford Foundation did, and asked him for advice and input on this new entity, Community Progress, Inc. Joe Goldstein was not only a law professor, but he was a psychoanalyst, a practicing psychoanalyst. And having looked at the plan, he said there are two thoughts that I have about things that I think ought to be included. One is we ought to provide a psychoanalytic opportunity, a training opportunity for grade school teachers to help them hopefully become more effective, more responsive to children that they're teaching. And the other plan that he had was we ought to have lawyers out in the neighborhoods with this Community Progress, Inc., because Community Progress was going to have neighborhood offices, and he thought it would be good to have lawyers out there so that they could find out what's going on in terms of the legal needs of poor people and what they think ought to be done to try and address those needs. So Ford was impressed with these ideas and went to 5 the person who had been designated to run Community Progress, Inc., and that was Michael Sviridoff, who was a good friend of the mayor. And the mayor and Ford and Sviridoff had been very much involved together in sort of designing and developing this program. And there's ______ to Sviridoff and said we've contracted with one of our consultants, and we have a couple of proposals, and explained the proposals to Mike Sviridoff. And Mike denied like either them and rejected them both. And Ford said, if you're going to go ahead with this program at all, you've got to accept one of these proposals. And Sviridoff's response was, as much as I dislike lawyers, and I do, I dislike psychoanalysts even more, so I'll take the lawyer program. And that's how it started. We had neighborhood lawyers in New Haven as a result of the Sviridoff decision, all of which was initiated by Joe Goldstein, who remained very close to the program over the years, was a -- really a guiding force and a mentor to many of us. So in January '63, this Community Progress program started, and I was one of the first lawyers. Jean Cahn was the second. The two of us started out January 2 of 1963, each in a separate neighborhood office. I was out in Wooster Square in the Conte school. Jean was out in the Dixwell area in the Winchester school. 6 And we were brand new. I had just graduated law school about a year or so before. I had not been to court. We didn't think it was necessary for us to have been in court. I remember Jean coming to me before we started and saying, Frank, what are we going to do? How are we going to do this? And I said, well, we'll just play it by ear, see what happens, and we'll handle it as things come up. There will be people we can talk to and we can consult, and I was young and perhaps foolish, but full of energy, and it was a very exciting kind of project. And so we joined on and we started. Our role at the beginning was to sort of observe, see what kinds of problems were coming into the office, what kinds of concerns people had and then discuss them and see what we could think of, like the appropriate agencies that could be tapped into to provide service or whether new agencies were needed. But we were really observers and, in a way, referral people or people who were seeking to solve problems in an innovative, creative way, because there were a lot of problems that had legal dimension that didn't really seem to have a place for resolution. There was not much available. There was a legal aid bureau available at the time, which had a part-time attorney in charge of that bureau 7 and about 50 students working there from the Yale Law School on a semester-by-semester basis, but it didn't do litigation, and it really did not have the resources to provide the needs that people that we saw in the community needed. What happened very shortly after we started was that people, realizing that we were there, came to us with problems, and we, as I said, were both looking at problems in terms of what are larger solutions that may be available, where are referral agencies that might be available or what, if anything, can we do? One of the problems that I got involved in at one point was a juvenile delinquency matter where the mother came to me saying that her son had not come home, she didn't know where he was, but he had been with some other kids and they thought that he had been arrested, and what could I do. So we went there to the police station, and there was a juvenile division of the police department. They were holding this boy, and I think he was maybe 12 or 13. I don't know what his age was. But they were holding him for interrogation, and the mother asked me to intercede on her behalf and to speak to them and to get him out. So I said, I'm the boy's attorney. The mother has asked me to come here. I want to speak to the boy. Well, they weren't used to 8 this. This was something new. This was all before In Re: Gault had ever been heard or decided. Children didn't have any rights. Delinquency cases were treated as civil matters. The juvenile court, and perhaps the police as well, were acting in parents parentis, in place of the parents, as parents, not as prosecutors, but as parents looking after the best interests of the children. So who was I, the attorney, to be coming in and interfering with this parents parentis arrangement that the police had with the child. But not knowing any better, I proceeded ahead anyway, and I met with the child, and I said, look, you don't have to say anything. You don't have to say anything to the police. My advice to you is not to say anything, and we'll see if we can get you released, but do not say anything. Well, I was able to talk to the child maybe for three or four minutes at the most, and they were at the door coming in; I had to leave. I said, no, I want to talk to my client. I want to stay with my client because I want to see that he gets released and is able to go home. No, they said, coming in and coming toward me, you have to leave, and I said, well -- not knowing what else 9 to say -- I said, well, if what you're saying is you're going to physically remove me if I don't leave, then I'll leave, so I left. And I said to him as I'm leaving, now, remember, you don't have to say anything to the police. Don't say anything. They didn't take that as being particularly helpful for the rehabilitation of this child. They thought it was overly contradiction. But the child ultimately got released to the mother and was treated as, in the system, as a delinquent. We did not represent the child further. That's the extent of my involvement in that. We had another case that came up in the other neighborhood that Jane Cahn was involved in involving a rape in which a -- an African American young man was being charged with the rape of a white woman. He was being represented by the public defender, but the mother of the man was not comfortable with the public defender system, and she wanted Jane Cahn, who was our attorney in the Dixwell neighborhood, who was a black woman, to be there at the counsel table and to be with the public defender. And although she did not appear in the case and we were not going to litigate really any cases at the moment because we were not in the position to do that, 10 but she was there at the counsel table to give some support to the accused just by being there at the request of the mother. Well, the newspapers picked this up and made a cause _______ out of it. What was this social service agency that had just been created, funded by Ford, outsiders, you know, with their outside money doing being involved in a case like this? It was inappropriate. And CPI didn't have any business being in this case, that it was not a part of the overall plan for the neighborhood lawyers to be doing this; so there was enormous criticism, but much of it is coming from the press, definitely who was very, very politically sensitive, did not like criticism at all. He came down hard on Mike Sviridoff about what the hell we were doing in the criminal court when there's a public defender in the case, and that was not to be an intended or was not an intended part of our role. So Sviridoff, who was running the program at that point, with his concerns and especially this particular concern about our being involved in individual cases and advocating for the rights of individuals when that meant going up against an agency that CPI was trying to negotiate with, work with on a much more cordial gentile 11 kind of fashion than confrontation and advocacy that what we were doing seemed to be working at cross purposes with what he was talking about and what he was trying to do. So he didn't see how this legal services dimension to his program could work at all, and in two months' time after we started on January 2, 1963, the program -- the neighborhood lawyer program came to a halt. It stopped. We were put on a very short leash, and we had to redesign or come up with a way to redesign the program. Jean left, actually, maybe two weeks after that, sometime in mid-March. She just left the program because she didn't want to be involved in the continuing hassle of this problem. What we did was we created a committee, a new committee, a legal advisory committee of lawyers in town who were sympathetic to the cause of providing legal services to poor people that would be a guiding kind of committee for Mike Sviridoff so that he would have a sense of what the legal community thought was appropriate or inappropriate, because he just felt totally at sea and somewhat overwhelmed by lawyers on one side advocating one kind of a policy and no lawyers on his side, ______+ and we had a group of people who 12 were there for the supervisory committee. Well, that was the beginning. It really lasted two, two and a half months before it came to a halt, and it was part of the -- kind of the turmoil that legal aid in New Haven has had sort of from the beginning from time to time. It varies in intensity, and it's sort of cyclical. But it has been part of our history. Now, despite all of this, the Ford Foundation thought this was fascinating. This was a fascinating development from their point of view, because it told them two things. One, there's a real need here for legal services for poor people. People want to use these services. There's a lot of need. It's just not being met. We've got to do something about that. And the other thing that it told them was you can't really run this kind of a program under the umbrella of a larger social service program. It just doesn't fit. It doesn't mesh. The methods of proceeding are totally different. Consultation and advocacy are quite different from negotiation and compromise, and the kind of thing that Community Progress was trying to do with other agencies. So we were somewhat stressed out and at constant loggerheads with Community Progress, Inc., in trying to develop a program that was going to be 13 workable. The Ford Foundation thought this was a breakthrough. We have learned a lot and we can do something here. And what they ultimately agreed to do was to fund the spinning off of a new corporate entity, which was New Haven Legal Assistance Association. It spun off out of CPI and actually became incorporated in September 1964. So it took well over a year for it all to happen, and -- but it stayed alive. We -- the program continued on. I stayed with the program, although what I did was -- because the mayor was feeling a lot of heat, he felt as a result of what was happening, he was then inclined to give up the city legal aid bureau, which was a city function and part of the ordinances of the city to any new entity that was created if it would take it over, and he would be involved in helping fund that arrangement, and Ford was interested in that as well. So I became the director of the municipal legal aid bureau at that time, and we had some ______ and that -- that was sort of the counterpart to the creation of New Haven Legal Assistance, and ultimately in 1965 or '6, we merged and we entered into a contract with the city to take over all of the function of the municipal legal aid bureau, and the city agreed to finance us in various 14 ways. One was to provide housing for our program in the old City Hall Annex. They gave us lots of space, all free. They paid for our phone service, which they continue to do to the present day, and if you look at the ordinances of the city, you'll see that the ordinances relating to the legal aid bureau are sustained there pending the continued performance of this contract that the city has with New Haven Legal Assistance. Now, what I said earlier that our roots go back to 1927, having incorporated the legal aid bureau into New Haven Legal Assistance, that bureau was started in 1927, and we are now, that bureau, as well as New Haven Legal Assistance all now New Haven Legal Assistance. That was a bureau that provided several legal services to people, for people of New Haven run by a _______ attorney and, as I said, with a large number of _______ law students, generally 50 or so per semester who would go down there and work several hours a week and did fantastic work. They had a manual that they created that was used on a regular basis to do all kinds of things. They handle eviction cases, paternity cases, _______ cases, _______+, bankruptcies, wage attachments, bank executions, and we got them by the dozens. 15 We would have hundreds of cases, really, 250 cases a month coming in there. All we did was give advice. We had forms that people could use. We helped people deal with problems that they have, but a part-time attorney wasn't enough to really be able to handle the problem. When I started then I was full-time because Ford paid the other part of my salary to make me be able to take on that job, and we started for the first time litigating; and as I said, I was brand new. I really learned on the job. I consulted with people who were on our advisory council, Charlie Parker being one of them, Joe Deciso (ph) being one of them, on a regular basis to figure out how to proceed and what to do. It's interesting. When we started representing people in eviction cases, that was something new. They had not been represented when they were being evicted, and what I did was I simply took the position that all of the defenses and all of the pleadings that were available in regular civil litigation should all apply to summary process, which is eviction litigation. And that's what we did. We simply incorporated and transposed everything over, and, generally, it worked. Although some judges would not allow discovery, for example, in eviction cases. That was prohibited because as one judge said in opinion, these are not civil 16 actions. What they were, if they're not civil actions, I don't know. But -- but that was the language of the discovery rule, and all civil actions you're entitled _______, and the way to get around that was to say, well, these are not civil actions. This is a special statutory proceeding, not a civil action, then you don't______. That thinking has long been abandoned and discovery is now readily available. But it used to be something that was _____ about. We were filing pleadings in eviction cases, and this was sort of unheard of. It was a novelty that this would happen. And when Legal Assistance first started up, a committee was appointed to examine all of our eviction files in the court to look at the pleadings to see whether they could find anything that we were doing that was inappropriate, unethical, illegal, whatever. And they had about four attorneys who were looking at these things, looking to see ________ could find, and the report of the committee came back saying we could find nothing wrong. One person came back and said, this stuff is pretty good, but the goal was to see if they could find anything wrong, and they could find nothing wrong. That was the report. When legal assistance started up, then, having been 17 incorporated in September of 1964, the -- a certain group and a fairly substantial group in the private bar was vehemently opposed to legal aid, to expanding legal aid. The argument was we have a legal aid bureau, now we have a full-time person there. That's enough. That's all we need. Why do we need any more? This is a big expansion right there. There isn't a need. You haven't demonstrated the need for any additional legal services. We don't need them. There was also the concern that what we were doing was illegal or unethical. We were soliciting clients. We were advertising. We were going out and saying we're here. We will represent you, you know, and we will be able to assist you. There was a feeling that that was unethical. There was a concern by members of the private bar that we would be taking business away. We would be representing people who otherwise would go to a private attorney _______+ if you were take a divorce case, somebody who was being divorced that needed to be represented, that case would probably have been handled by the private bar because that person, one way or another, would come up with the money. They would get it somehow. And the example was, you know, if a woman is being 18 divorced, she has a boyfriend, and he'll pay the money to represent her in the divorce_______. So there was this big fear that we would be taking cases away from the private bar, _______ generating cases or fee-paying clients, and that they would lose business. There was a fear that we might change the standard of practice. Again, look at summary process. Nobody was, you know -- landlord attorneys would go in and get judgments. Nobody would appear and nobody would plead. So now there was going to be a new kind of practice going on if we were going to be involved in cases that nobody had been involved before. So there were meetings of the local county bar association, the most highly attended meetings that they had ever had. They stopped serving roast beef because it was too expensive because too many people were showing up to these ________+, but it used to be that 15 people maybe were drawn in, now we were having 50, 60, 70 people showing up at these meetings. So they couldn't feed them. But the people were there, and the attacks on New Haven Legal Assistance were really vehement. We were outlanders. We did not belong. And we didn't understand, you know, the practice, and -- and so at one of the meetings our new executive director attended, 19 because they had a lot of questions, and we thought it would be sensible if he'd be there. We assumed that they would call him in and want to ask him questions. But they didn't want to let him in. He was not a member of the bar of the State of Connecticut yet. He was from Washington, D.C. And he certainly was not a member of the county bar and a member of the association, and therefore even though he was right outside the door in the courtroom -- and it's the housing courtroom that this was taking place. It was ______ courtroom. They would not invite him in, so they had to take a vote, and there was a big debate about whether to invite him in or not, and ultimately by about two or three votes, it was decided he should be invited in to explain the program. Makes sense. Have the guy come in, at least let them know what the program's about. If they were going to discuss it and try and vote on it, so I went out to bring him in, and I said, Fred, these people are crazy. This is really, really violent here. So, you know, be careful______. Now, he had been a professor of ______ University, and he got in there and they started asking questions, and he fielded those questions in a marvelous way, like a professor in a classroom of students. A question was, well, you have -- you know, what 20 can you tell us about the need? Have you documented the need for free legal services for poor people? He said, well, that's a good question. And that's one of the questions we're going to look at. We want to look at that carefully to see exactly what the extent of the need is that we have here. And so every question that was focused at him as an attack, he_______. He was able to pick them up and expand and enlarge upon them and make it into really kind of an academic inquiry, that we were going to look at this and we were going to proceed ________ find a way, and we were going to ask for advice of counsel with respect to claims that are being made that were violating the tenets of ethics. We were going to get an opinion, and he really diffused that kind of hostility, at least for the moment, at that meeting. They could not reach him. They could not find buttons to press. He was -- he was really cool, and _______ when this ________ we got the right guy for this job, because he was able to handle that so nicely. Ultimately, though, at the end of that meeting, obviously majority voted against New Haven Legal Assistance and _______ legal aid the program in New Haven, they saw it as being too involved with social work, that we were not something that was -- was 21 following a legal program. We were going to do so _____ of the need and ______ of delivery systems. In fact, we had several different kinds of plans for different kind of delivery of legal services in the community. One was a______. We would have an office where we would refer out pro bono, and ______+, and one was the staff attorney program that we would have regular staff attorneys who would do the work as opposed to referring cases out. So there were a range of different ideas that we were exploring in connection with the ______ at legal services. Ultimately it was decided that the state bar ought to pass on this, and I think it was the ethics committee that was asked to review what we were doing and to rule on whether we were doing things properly and abiding by the canons of ethics and so forth. They sent us a series of questions, like Interrogatories. We had a set of Interrogatories that we had to answer, and we prepared answers to those. The committee reviewed that all and ultimately concluded that there was nothing that we were doing that was improper, illegal or in violation of any of the canons of ethics, and at that point we proceeded. We held off opening up an office until we got that ruling from the state bar, and then we opened up offices, and we had neighborhood 22 offices on Grant Avenue -- not Grant Avenue -- on Congress, and on Dixon (ph). Those were the first two offices______. Those were the first two offices that we opened. We ultimately had maybe seven or eight offices going at one point, but that's how we started. We, in '65, started getting money from the federal government. The Economic Opportunity Act had been passed in 1964. Money was being made available for legal services program services in '65, and we were one of the first programs in the country that got funded through federal funding. This was a very dramatic change from the past ______+ legal services, and at this point now we had Ford Foundation funding. We had some local funding. One of the things that we did was seek out ways to find funding. We had, at some point at the very beginning, 10 or 12 different sources of funding. And that was when our government came in and became a major supporter of our program. We're one of the few programs that got funded for our criminal defense work as well as civil, and that's because we always ________ legal assistance. We always had a criminal defense component, and the federal legal services program agreed that we would be grandfathered in to continue that. So we've always had a full range of both civil and criminal defense. 23 I'm at a point where I'm beyond the time that I wanted to limit myself because I had to go over to a meeting that I have going on right now. So______, but those are the beginning years. That's how it started, and it has been on a regular basis a program that, because of what we do, because it's confrontational, adversarial, because we're of our advocacy, because we are involved in trying to bring about change that we have, from time to time, difficulties, difficulties with funding sources, political difficulties with different groups. Certainly with the congress we were, over the years, and certainly with the legal services corporation and _______ will tell you about with legal services _______ and with our funding situation vis-a-vis ______ but that was _____ so --