ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses several observations concerning the role of litigation as a stress-dealing and relieving factor in a governance crisis. Litigation provides an immediate weapon with which the politically and economically disadvantaged may seek to influence the institutions and officials of local government. The dynamics of the litigation process almost ensure that recourse will be had to external value systems and criteria in the process of deciding the issues of equality and minimum entitlement. Pre-Office of Economic Opportunity (OEO) experience with legal aid and population distribution patterns appear to have been primary influences in determining the number of grantees within a given territorial or political entity. The poverty-law movement is a revolution because it significantly expands the "belief as to the practice of the community or of a class" and the "opinion as to policy" which must be weighed and accounted in the evolution of compromises or tradeoffs that are the object and exercise of governance.
