On April 14, 1900, 16 prominent members of the Boston Bar met in the office of Mr. Charles P. Greenough, Esq., and incorporated the Boston Legal Aid Society. The Legal Aid Society was founded to make real the right of everyone to seek justice through the court system. The Society was created as the mechanism to provide justice for all.
Today’s Greater Boston Legal Services is the result of the merger of three legal services organizations, each with its own proud history of serving poor people: the Boston Legal Aid Society, the Boston Legal Assistance Project, and Cambridge and Somerville Legal Services. The Boston Legal Aid Society, founded in 1900, was the third legal services organization established in the United States. The Society served everyone from the enormous number of Irish immigrants at the turn of the century, to indigent soldiers heading off to fight two World Wars.
In 1967, a national movement emerged to provide legal services through a more grass-roots, neighborhood-based approach. To that end, The Boston Legal Assistance Project was created with funds from the Ford Foundation and the federal Office of Economic Opportunity. The Legal Assistance Project operated with technical assistance from the Society until 1976, when the two organizations merged to form Greater Boston Legal Services (GBLS). This merger paralleled the creation by Congress of the federal Legal Services Corporation (LSC), an important milestone in legal services’ history.
Operating since 1967, Cambridge and Somerville Legal Services, Inc. (CASLS), itself the product of a merger of two legal services organizations, focused on housing and homelessness prevention, family law/domestic violence, public benefits, mental health and disability rights and immigration/political asylum cases. In 1996, to offset the dramatic loss of revenue created by significant cuts in federal LSC money, GBLS and CASLS merged. Today, our Cambridge program continues to reach out to the neediest in the community through individual representation, and CASLS continues its leadership role in systemic advocacy for the alleviation of poverty.
