Introduction

By the mid-twentieth century, Chile could pride itself on having one of the most developed legal aid systems in Latin America, both in terms of caseload and geographical coverage.^[773] The relative strength of legal aid in Chile was due to the firm commitment of the Bar Association in creating and administering the Chilean Legal Aid Service, founded in 1932.

¹ See footnote 18.

This chapter argues that there were two important reasons behind the close link between the lawyers’ guild and legal aid in Chile. The first one was that the Bar Association came to rely on legal aid for its own funding, and eventually these resources became the only source of income for the bar itself. The second reason was that the Bar Association resorted to the Legal Aid Service to reinforce its control over new generations of lawyers, through training and disciplinary procedures. Indeed, the Chilean Bar Association (Colegio de Abogados de Chile, CAC), created in 1925, was controlled by the male right-wing legal elite based in Santiago, and its main purpose was to control a new generation of lawyers of more diverse social backgrounds. The Legal Aid Service (Servicio de Asistencia Judicial, SAJ) was established as the main training ground for new members of the legal profession, through a mandatory six-month internship that all law graduates had to perform after finishing law school. Additionally, the CAC oversaw court-appointed lawyers on rotation (abogados de turno) who were obliged to defend the poor for free. Lawyers who failed to fulfil these requirements could be subjected to the CAC’s disciplinary procedures.

Thus, the Chilean Bar Association had a strong stake in the develop­ment of the Legal Aid Service, explaining why both institutions emerged and grew in tandem in the first half of the twentieth century. In this sense, the history of the Chilean SAJ is a textbook illustration of Richard Abel’s argument, according to which legal aid is primarily established to respond to the needs of the legal profession rather than to serve its poor clients.^[775]

Precisely for this reason, the bar’s engagement with this self-imposed function was fraught. The relationship between the CAC and the SAJ moved quickly from symbiosis to parasitism, as the CAC absorbed part of the already scarce resources allocated to legal aid. There were also conflict­ing interests between the training and control of lawyers and the growing demand for free legal services. Furthermore, as legal aid came to work as a mechanism of control, it faced the resistance of lawyers to the imposition of this new form of discipline. The CAC’s elite leadership, whose hold

over the organisation was increasingly contested, became hesitant of being too severe in exercising its disciplinary control. This resulted in their privi­leging professional solidarity over effective control of the quality of the service delivered by legal aid practitioners.

While initially the intermingled relationship between legal aid and the bar acted as a positive synergy allowing the mutual expansion of both institutions, over time it became detrimental to the Legal Aid Service, and, in the long run, to the CAC itself. Indeed, by the 1960s, as the country embarked in a new era of structural reforms, both the SAJ and the CAC failed to adapt and entered a period of crisis. By 1981, this would eventu­ally lead to the demise of the CAC and to a new era of state-run legal aid.

This chapter begins by analysing the institutional and financial arrange­ment that tied the CAC to the SAJ. It then explains how the SAJ operated not only as an outlet for free legal services but also as a mechanism for training and disciplining lawyers, and the contradictions and tensions that arose from this combination. I conclude by sketching how, due to the crisis of this model, both the bar and the Legal Aid Service were trans­formed in the 1980s.