Historical Note

The Reginald Heber Smith Community Lawyer Fellowship Program (RHS) was established in 1967 in order to attract young lawyers to the field of poverty law. Initially sponsored by the Legal Services Program within the Office of Economic Opportunity and administered by the University of Pennsylvania, the program recruited recent law school graduates, trained them in various aspects of poverty law, and placed them (for one or two years) in regional legal services projects throughout the country.

The program was named for Reginald Heber Smith, author of Justice and the Poor (1919), a work that is credited with furthering the legal aid movement in the United States; and the Program's Fellows were accordingly called Reggies. In 1969, the Program was moved from the University of Pennsylvania to Howard University where greater emphasis was placed on attracting minority Fellows. When OEO was dismantled in the mid-1970's, the Reggie Program moved to the Legal Services Corporation. From 1967 to 1985, when the program ended, there were approximately 2,000 Reggies.

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