1X
Peter Adler hosts a roundtable on lawyers and their obligations to Hawaii communities. Jim Paul argues that because lawyers hold a government-granted monopoly on legal practice, the profession carries a duty of public service. The Hawaii Supreme Court has adopted an aspirational goal of fifty pro bono hours per year, but Coralie Chun Matayoshi contends that a mandatory requirement risks compelling poor-quality work and may be constitutionally problematic. Karen Holt reports that Legal Aid Society has cut twenty percent of its staff and now has fewer than forty paid lawyers statewide serving those who cannot afford counsel; with the incoming Republican Congress threatening to eliminate federal legal services funding, she calls on private attorneys to become partners. Paul replies that voluntary efforts have not closed the gap in decades of trying. A caller describes spending months looking for a lawyer after breaking her wrist in a hospital fall, without success—a concrete case of what Paul calls widening unmet need. Other callers debate whether attorneys generate unnecessary litigation, and a visiting physician compares medicine's longstanding pro bono practice to the legal profession's more reluctant one. The surviving recording ends at approximately 43:50 due to a power outage.
Transcript
Read or download the full transcript (.txt). Speaker labels were assigned automatically and may contain errors.