'Dogged Fighter': Legal Services Founder and Advocate Melville 'De' Miller Has Died | New Jersey Law Journal

The national Legal Services Corporation grew out of the Office of Economic Opportunity - the 1965 `War on Poverty' program before the Vietnam war consumed the Presidency of Lyndon Johnson.  Led by Kennedy brother-in-law Sargent Shriver the `Neighborhood Legal Services' offices sprang up around the country.  New York's Mobilization for Youth sponsored MFY Legal Services.  MFY brought the landmark Goldberg v. Kelly case which entitled people who were cut off from government benefits to a hearing to challenge the action.

My first job as a licensed lawyer was as a staff attorney in the Landlord Tenant unit of Essex-Newark Legal Services.  My former partner Mark Goldman was in the consumer bankruptcy unit before Congress barred such work because it cut into the income of the private bar.  That's how Mark went into business with me.  Forty years later he is still representing consumers afflicted with debt.

But staying afloat was a struggle for the independent neighborhood offices.  Melville D. Mill, - known only as `De' - saw that the offices needed a statewide structure.  Consolidated through Legal Services of New Jersey which he founded and led for almost fifty years.  Though Legal Services has long been a target of federal budget cutters, the program has survived through bar, court, and federal support. - gwc

'Dogged Fighter': Legal Services Founder and Advocate Melville 'De' Miller Has Died | New Jersey Law Journal

Melville Miller, a founder of Legal Services of New Jersey and its longtime president, died Monday at age 76.

Miller helped to start Legal Services of New Jersey, kept it running amid ever-present fiscal pressures, and was an advocate for New Jersey residents living in poverty.

Miller, who was known to friends as De, became director of a regional affiliate, Middlesex County Legal Services, in 1972, then became the first president and executive director of Legal Services of New Jersey in 1975. He continued in that capacity until the summer of 2020, when he assumed the role of president emeritus and Dawn Miller became the group’s president. He remained active in Legal Services business even after he retired.

“He had an absolutely passionate commitment to equal justice and access to justice. He was a visionary and a leader who did more to construct the legal services and legal aid landscape than anybody else I know. It was his passionate commitment to access to justice that kept him going over the years,” said Douglas Eakeley, a professor at Rutgers Law School in Newark who was on the Legal Services of New Jersey board during Miller’s tenure.

After attending Amherst College and Harvard Law School, Miller worked in a large New York law firm for a time before opting to pursue a public service career, Eakeley said.

“I think very early on, he felt a sense of calling and was drawn to this work. This was right when the movement [to provide legal services to poor people] was getting going, and I think he wanted to be part of that movement,” Eakeley said.

Legal Services of New Jersey has 420 employees, including 180 attorneys, and provides legal representation in civil matters to low-income residents in all of the state’s 21 countries.

Legal services organizations in New Jersey and nationwide have faced existential challenges in the form of funding cuts by elected officials Washington, the first during the Nixon administration and the second from Congress during the Clinton administration.

But Miller was able to find new funding sources for Legal Services, including an increase in state funding and the program directing interest on lawyers’ trust accounts to the group’s coffers.

Under Miller’s leadership, the Legal Services of New Jersey Poverty Research Institute was created in 1997 and has developed a series of data-based reports designed to spotlight how poverty has steadily increased in one of the wealthiest states of the nation, reaching the point that there are some 3 million New Jerseyans in what Miller defined as “true poverty” or those essentially living daily lives of “deprivation.”

Cynthia Jacob, the chairwoman of the Legal Services of New Jersey board of directors and an attorney at Fisher Phillips in Murray Hill, said in a statement that MIller “made New Jerseyans far better understand the depth and consequences to the poor of our state. And he was a dogged fighter to that end. In short, he cared. His passion for Legal Services and its clients was all consuming, second only for his love for family.”

Jacob noted that through all the funding challenges for Legal Services, “De Miller stood fast as a stalwart in keeping Legal Services afloat in hard times and maintaining the most crucial services the impoverished and others need.”

She said, “He never gave up—even in the hardest of times.”