Training and Disciplining Lawyers Through Legal Aid

Law Interns: Training Future Lawyers

The 1934 law that established the mandatory internship requirement came to define the SAJ’s institutional structure and workflow in the decades to come.

The free labour that law students provided through the unpaid manda­tory internship was essential to the functioning of the SAJ. The rationale was that this internship would fulfil law students’ need for practical train­ing and instil within them their “social function” by working for the poor. In 1945, the SAJ Director explained:

Future lawyers acquire, when confronted with the harsh reality of life [...] more than professional knowledge [.] they also receive the eloquent teach­ings that emerge from human misery [...], which will be helpful in their future, so they can perform their duties with more tolerance and in a spirit of social solidarity.^[806]

The six-month mandatory internship in the SAJ was meant to train new Chilean lawyers not only professionally but also socially and ethically. Thus, the internship was the occasion for the CAC to mould new genera­tions of lawyers and eventually, to filter out the candidates who did not conform to this model. This was possible because the CAC General Board reviewed every internship report, and the interns who failed this review were unable to obtain their law licence.

When in 1929 the CAC and the University of Chile made the first steps to impose the mandatory internship, the first reaction of the law students’ body was resistance, especially among the students who were close to graduation. The decree was eventually rescinded.^[807] When finally a 1934 law imposed the mandatory internship, the CAC was careful that it would not affect currently graduating law students. This strategy worked: no protestation was heard within the student community.^[808]

Nevertheless, between 1937 and 1951, law students mobilised to make the internship requirement more flexible. The SAJ internship was particu­larly taxing for law students who worked as full-time clerks in the lower courts. In Chile, being a court clerk was a lowly job, often performed by non-lawyers. It was so poorly remunerated that many law clerks made most of their income through small bribes. Law clerks who took up law studies to improve their career opportunities were among the poorest and oldest law students, already dealing with heavy family obligations.^[809] Financial hardship probably explains why, in 1937, this group requested the Board to waive the legal aid internship requirement in their case to expedite their licencing process, especially considering that they already had practical experience working in the courts. Board Directors opposed the waiver, considering it “detrimental” for the SAJ.^[810] However, in 1945, with the support from the Judiciary, law-student-clerks were successful: Congress passed a law establishing that the SAJ internship could be waived after five years of court clerking.^[811]

In 1946, law students sought the option to replace the six-month internship in the SAJ with the same time of practice in a lower court. Disregarding the General Board’s opposition, Congress passed the law.^[812] This measure encompassed a much larger pool of students and was much more harmful to the SAJ.^[813] The majority of the Board considered that the court internship would not fulfil the same “social function” as working in legal aid.

As many law students, particularly the ones from more modest back­grounds, tried to escape the requirement of the legal aid internship, the General Board, with the argument of promoting lawyers’ “social func­tion,” made sure to protect this crucial source of free labour for the SAJ and to maintain the control over the training of future Chilean lawyers.

Keeping control over law interns was crucial because, as shown in Fig. 3, they were by far the most important source of manpower for the SAJ, particularly in Santiago.

Between the 1930s and 1950s, there were at least three law interns per staff lawyer, five by the 1960s, and up to eight by the early 1970s. Each law intern handled around 80-120 cases, which meant that each staff law­yer had a docket of 300-800 cases to supervise. Given the workload, law interns did almost the same job as professional lawyers, and they were increasingly trusted with more complex aspects of litigation.^[817]

However, relying so strongly on law interns posed a number of prob­lems. Given the interns’ quick rotation, and considering the lengthy writ­ten procedures and sluggish pace of Chilean courts, there was little continuity in the processing of cases, diluting responsibilities for their out­come.

Moreover, law interns were inexperienced, which meant that their work had to be supervised, and the extent of this oversight was uneven. Certainly, they were controlled at several steps: first, by one of the SAJ staff lawyers, then by the SAJ Director, and finally, by the Bar Association Board. The direct supervision by the SAJ staff lawyers was the more meaningful form of guidance, though its efficacy varied greatly: some staff lawyers were on top of their interns, while others would hardly show up to the office.^[821] This happened because the SAJ permanent staff was not only seriously overworked but also grossly underpaid—particularly in the provinces—so all staff lawyers held a second job or had their own law practice.^[822] Regarding the last step of the review performed by the CAC General Board, it was accomplished on the basis of a full report on every judicial and administra­tive step the interns had completed for each of their assigned cases, though it is unclear whether this review process was thorough.^[823] The Boards kept no consistent statistic on the numbers of failed internships, which was in any case rare.^[824] Still, when this happened, Directors considered the situa­tion carefully.

In the early 1950s, the General Board became increasingly concerned with the quality of law interns work and with the laxity of their evaluation, and it asked the SAJ Director to be stricter in the control and grading of interns.^[828] However, the CAC did not rethink its policy of sanctioning mediocre, careless, or dishonest law interns with something different than extending their internship period.^[829] Also, every time there was the slight­est chance that another institution would take over even partial responsi­bility of supervising internships, the General Board objected forcefully. It argued that the CAC was the sole institution with the expertise and moral reserve to accomplish such a delicate and important duty.^[830]

In more subtle ways, the SAJ also contributed to forge the character of new generations of Chilean lawyers by instilling in them the values of aristocratic-bourgeois gentility on which the collective prestige of the pro­fession rested.^[831] This was achieved through the example set by senior male staff lawyers over their young interns. In interviews conducted with law­yers about their internship experience in the 1950s and 1960s, they all emphasised the respect that their supervisors elicited from them because they were true “gentlemen,” who taught them the values of selflessness, moderation, conciliation, and rationality.

Overall, then, the CAC Board’s control over law interns was real, but it had more to do with affirming the Board’s authority over their younger (and less wealthy) colleagues than with the substantive quality of the interns’ work in the legal defence of poor litigants. In the end, the Board’s control over interns prioritised the enforcement of internal professional hierarchies based on age, class, and gender over the goal of improving access to justice.

How did law interns themselves experience the legal aid internship, and what meaning did they take away from it? Certainly, many students appre­ciated the professional and life experience they acquired in the SAJ, find­ing valuable professional training and a rewarding social experience helping other people. One of them noted in 1947 that the SAJ internship allowed them to “acquire a life experience that teaches them how hard and sad life can be for indigent people.”^[836] Some went out of their way to obtain posi­tive results for their clients and performed acts of charity such as covering judicial fees or other expenses from their own pocket. Such was the case of law intern Jose Dominguez in 1950 in the case of a seventy-year-old laun­dress who sued her employer for breaking her glasses in a fight. After several failed attempts at summoning the employer for mediation, Dominguez decided to pay for the broken glasses himself.^[837]

Also, in interviews I conducted in 2016, lawyers who interned in the 1950s and early 1960s in Santiago and Temuco remembered their intern­ship experience as extremely positive. For instance, Andres Aylwin—a Christian Democrat and one of the most famous human rights lawyers of the dictatorship period—did his internship in San Bernardo, a rural depart­ment in the outskirts of Santiago, in 1952. He recalled that the internship was “a legal requirement” but also a “very agreeable” experience. He felt great admiration for his supervisor, and the experience was so pleasant and fulfilling that after graduating, he continued to work for the SAJ as a pro­fessional staff lawyer for almost fifteen years.^[838]

Luis Ortiz Quiroga—today one of the most famous criminal lawyers in Chile—also recalls fondly the internship he completed in 1957. The SAJ’s professional instruction introduced him to criminal law, a field in which the Santiago SAJ offices had particularly good staff lawyers. When he achieved good results, the criminal defendants he represented brought him gifts.^[839]

Renato Maturana who completed his internship in the southern city of Temuco in 1963 also remembers warmly his time in the SAJ. The Temuco SAJ Director behaved like a benevolent father, excusing him when he arrived late at the office for playing football. He developed a close friend­ship with his direct supervisors, and when he started his own law practice, they would refer cases to him. Also, the social function of the SAJ was not lost on him:

I was deeply marked by how the Legal Aid Service worked, and when I became a lawyer, in my professional practice I kept taking cases in the same way, mostly from rural folks. Knowing that they had no means, sometimes I would not charge them the lawyer’s fees, only the expenses, and even many times I covered the expenses myself [.] Many people know me in Temuco, and if you ask them, they will tell you ‘oh, yes, he is the lawyer of the poor’. anyways. This truly makes me proud, it pleases me.^[840]

Maturana’s generosity and the long-lasting exercise of his “social func­tion” was also not an obstacle in developing a prosperous law practice because the more people he defended, the more cases came to him, both paying and non-paying customers.

On the other hand, the SAJ internship could be crucial and formative even when it was difficult or frustrating. Lawyers who completed their SAJ internship at a later period—late 1960s and 1970s—in general describe their participation in less positive terms than the older generation.^[841] For instance, Jose Antonio Viera Gallo who interned in the Civil Section of the Santiago SAJ in 1966 recalls it as a “very traumatic experience, because they would assign you 100 cases, and I tried to reach settlements in all of them, otherwise you would never make progress because the justice sys­tem is so slow, so traditional, you couldn’t process them properly, there was no time, no way to handle them all.”^[842] This frustrating professional practice made him aware of the need to reform the legal aid system: he eventually became Deputy Secretary of Justice during the socialist govern­ment of Salvador Allende (1970-1973), and from this post he promoted reforms to legal aid and the justice system.^[843]

Carlos Kunsemuller—currently a Supreme Court magistrate—felt a similar sense of empowerment emerging from a difficult situation during his internship in 1969-1970 at the Criminal Section of La Granja, one of the most dangerous slums in Santiago at the time. The neighbourhood was so unsafe that the judge carried a gun in his belt. But while most of his fellow interns were terrified of getting mugged, tired of the long com­mutes, and scared of their own clients, he felt a sense of excitement: his passion was criminal law, and this was the place to learn the real, uncoated practice of the trade. Kunsemuller would also have a long professional career in legal aid, working in the SAJ as a staff lawyer from 1972 up to the late 1990s.^[844]

It is probably not a coincidence that all these lawyers for whom the SAJ internship was an uplifting experience—either because of its “pleasant­ness” or because of its challenges—would later in their lives carry out a socially and even politically committed form of legal practice: eventually their moral, political, or religious convictions led all of them to the defence of human rights during the dictatorship years.^[845] The SAJ could thus, for some lawyers, reinforce their sense of social responsibility.

However, many other law students perceived the legal aid internship as an annoying and taxing bureaucratic requirement that only delayed their entry into the job market. In 1947 Maria Rojas Bruges, who interned in the Valparaiso SAJ, noted that many students conceived of the internship as “a mere requirement to obtain their law licence,” not as a moral respon­sibility or a social mission.^[846] Indeed, for some law interns, the experience was overall a burden and they mostly felt contempt or even disgust towards the poor clients they were forced to represent. For example, Ramiro Contreras noted in his 1948 internship report that one of his clients “had no idea of what she is asking [...] she doesn’t know what she wants [...] and she confuses the things the bar has already done for her.”^[847] Confronted with the difficulty of gathering witnesses or obtaining information from his clients, he felt “discouraged in having to work with irresponsible people.”^[848] By the end of his internship, having lost a labour case, he unleashed his frustration:

[T]his trial, like many others that I have had to deal with during the course of this internship has been lost only and exclusively due to the lack of wit­nesses. Clients [.] come to the Legal Aid Office many times with the sole purpose of annoying their former employer. The expression that I have heard from many of them is that they want their boss to “stop laughing.” Probably if they were fired, it was for a good reason.^[849]

Interns like Contreras were irritated and even hostile towards their legal aid clients, and the internship did not reconcile them with the interests of the lower classes or with their “social function,” rather the opposite. For some students, the internship, regardless of its meaning, was a heavy finan­cial burden since it delayed their graduation and forced them to work for free. Some students asked for the possibility to waive or shorten their internship “for financial reasons,” a request that was always denied.^[850] The result was that many interns worked a paying position while interning, and their legal aid cases suffered from it.^[851]

For others, the SAJ internship was merely an unpleasant and hardly use­ful requirement. Enrique Sandoval Urrutia, a Temuco lawyer who came from a family of well-to-do landowners, did his internship in Santiago between 1970 and 1971. Of his passage through the SAJ, he mostly remembered the “unsanitary” building of the labour courts “infested by bedbugs.” Everyday returning from the internship, his wife would “put an old bed sheet in the bathroom so that I would take off my clothes and get rid of the bugs I had all over me.”^[852] According to him, the “routine” and “simple” nature of labour cases was poor compensation for these uncom­fortable working conditions, since he had previously worked for several years as a paralegal, and therefore, the SAJ internship had very little to teach him. Considering his disdain for the poor litigants he was forced to serve, his daily cleansing ritual most likely helped him get rid of the meta­phorical bugs that were his poor clients. After obtaining his licence in 1975 during Pinochet’s military dictatorship (1973-1989), Sandoval, a right-wing sympathiser, developed a practice in commercial law and in rolling back Allende’s agrarian reform in the Temuco region.^[853]

As these examples illustrate, the internship’s experience and its social, political, or professional meaning varied according to the law graduates’ political, moral, or religious beliefs. As a result, some law students warmly embraced the SAJ tenets based on the lawyers’ social function, while for others it was no more than a “mere procedure.” For some of them, the internship was a financial burden or an obstacle in their professional devel­opment, but for others who did not have to worry about money, the mentorship from their experienced supervisors, and the professional prac­tice they acquired was deeply valued. For some others, the legal aid intern­ship jumpstarted their career, allowing them to build connections with practising lawyers that would refer them cases or becoming legal aid law­yers themselves.

In any case, the anecdotal evidence from the interviews suggests that by the late 1960s and 1970s the perception of the internship experience dete­riorated, with interns describing it either as more disagreeable or more challenging. This coincides with an increase in the number of law interns per staff lawyer supervisor (see Fig. 3), and with the General Board’s sense of the decreasing quality of law interns’ work. In 1965, Mario Mosquera, a former SAJ staff lawyer and a CAC General Board Director, affirmed that the internship’s “social function” was “no longer in force” because “only a minority devotes themselves to the SAJ with the intensity that the task requires.”^[854]

But regardless of the students’ personal commitment to legal aid work, the SAJ did deliver some important teachings to its interns: these lessons were about what was considered relevant lawyerly work. The SAJ’s con­ception of lawyering was clearly reflected in the format of the internship reports. These lengthy reports—more than a hundred pages each—pro­vided very little personal information on the clients or on the specific con­tent of cases. They were written from templates in formulaic terms, and they usually described a list of the paperwork that the student had pro­cessed in each case.^[855]

This model, constant throughout the years, was telling of what law students should take away from the SAJ: becoming effective at processing cases, not dwelling on their clients’ personal problems. The practice of lawyering was understood as the accumulation of paperwork, the obser­vance of the successive steps of the procedure, the diligent oversight of the courts’ machinery. Lawyering was not about solving a personal or collec­tive problem. It was not even about the substantive or even procedural legal arguments made in court. It was not about being a good negotiator and reaching a successful settlement. About this, interns had very little to say. Conversely, they would lengthily describe each time they stamped a certificate, requested information from a court clerk, or asked for the cop­ies of a document. In the end, law interns’ lack of a deeper personal or “social commitment” to the SAJ was not only of their own making: it also reflected what the SAJ’s evaluation system and what their supervisors expected from them. At the end of the day, what law interns had learned from the SAJ was a formalistic and strictly procedural approach to the law more akin to paper pushing than serving their clients’ needs.

Disciplining Abogados de Turno

Law interns were not the only source of unpaid work in legal aid: the SAJ also partially relied on abogados de turno (hereinafter, the turno lawyers), unpaid court-appointed lawyers on rotation. This system had been the only legal aid mechanism—an insufficient and inadequate one—before the creation of the SAJ. Unlike law interns who were recent graduates, turno lawyers were licensed professionals who, on top of the legal aid internship they had already completed, were subjected to this second legal aid obliga­tion throughout their career, though it usually fell on younger lawyers. In its early years, the SAJ Directors had the conviction that the turno was “anachronistic, the remnant of a past time,” and that they should be replaced by “specialised professionals under the guarantee of an effective vigilance and control.”^[856] However, as the SAJ’s caseload expanded and the interns and professional staff were unable to meet the demand, the SAJ Director changed its mind towards turno lawyers, and by 1945 they were considered “essential auxiliaries” of the Service.^[857] Their numbers grew steadily at least until 1953 (Fig. 3). Each abogado de turno received a dozen cases, and they helped the Santiago SAJ process around 1000 cases a year, close to 5% of its caseload, mostly but not exclusively in crimi­nal cases.

Still, almost every year, SAJ reports complained about the turno law­yers’ lack of diligence, the mediocre quality of their written and oral defences, the fact that they did not report back to the SAJ, and sometimes even lost case files. Most of all, the Director emphasised their lack of “spirit of social cooperation” and hoped that some day they would understand the “social importance” of their labour.^[858] They repeatedly enjoined their colleagues to “act with all possible diligence [...] so that the social func­tion they perform in benefit of the poor can be exhibited as a source of pride for our profession.”^[859]

The SAJ tried to control turno lawyers through several mechanisms, employing both the carrot and the stick. For example, in 1935, the CAC General Board sent congratulatory notes to turno lawyers who had been particularly diligent.^[860] However, this symbolic reward was not enough to guarantee good service. Therefore, in 1936 the SAJ adopted the policy of initiating disciplinary actions against negligent turno lawyers in front of the bar.^[861] The CAC Board decided that the turno performance would remain on the lawyer’s record and that negligent turno lawyers would be excluded from the list of suitable candidates to judicial positions.^[862] Up to the 1960s, the CAC went through cyclical phases of heavier enforcement of the turno obligations, followed by periods when it relaxed its control.^[863]

Lawyers did not challenge the imposition of the turno obligation per se, but they resented the SAJ’s supervision over their work.^[864] For instance, in 1937, Lisandro Cruz Ponce, a turno lawyer subjected to a disciplinary procedure, reaffirmed his moral commitment to the social function of legal aid. He stressed that he had volunteered to take the turno “to help a friend,” that he had put “all [his] enthusiasm and knowledge” to the point of “depriving [him]self of [his] holidays to help the people in need.” Still, he pushed back against the SAJ’s intention of controlling his work:

Everyone knows of the disciplinary sanction that the Colegio applied to one of the turno lawyers [.] What have been the benefits of this measure? Only and exclusively satisfying the public. However, among the turno lawyers who have served under the SAJ, there has been a logical reaction against this Service. [T]hey do not see in the SAJ Director a friend or a colleague, but someone from whom one has to carefully be guarded against because sooner or later, he could play a dirty trick on you. This is why young lawyers fear the turno. [N]ot so much because of the inconveniences that it necessarily entails, such as losing time [.] and the legal aid clients’ endless annoyances, but because they are afraid of the SAJ’s officials themselves. With such dras­tic measures, the only result will be to turn the unpaid service of lawyers into something hateful.^[865]

Despite these allegations of extreme harshness, usually the sanctions against negligent turno lawyers were mild. Most complaints against turno lawyers were simply dismissed or filed.^[866] Other times, the CAC would opt for a friendly but firm reminder of the turno obligations instead of a formal sanction.^[867] In other cases, when it did apply sanctions, it was in general for failing to answer the CAC’s summons, not because of any significant control of the quality of their work.^[868]

The control of turno lawyers seemed even more erratic in the prov­inces, where the pressure for professional solidarity was more intense due to the smaller size and less stratified nature of the legal community. In 1943 the Temuco Bar Association Provincial Board was forced to deal with the quality of abogados de turno, when the local press denounced that two death penalty cases had been poorly defended by turno lawyers. One of the defendants was Ana Maria Gatica, a very poor young woman accused of infanticide. The only proof against her was her own confession, and the newspaper deplored that in the 80-page case-file, “her whole defence was a ten-line brief.”^[869] Mario Gil, the turno lawyer in charge of her defence, retorted that, considering the plain confession of the defendant, “he could only claim attenuating circumstances, nothing more, and for this there is no need for tedious or pompous written allegations, which are generally useless and detrimental for the judge’s work.”^[870]

In the Temuco Bar Association some Directors affirmed that the defence had been “adequate” and “adjusted to the legal process,” while others considered that he could have “done more.” The Temuco Board finally decided that “although the performance of Mr. Mario Gil in the defence of defendant Rosa Gatica has been correct, he could have been more thorough considering the seriousness of the offence.”^[871] The ruling did not impose a formal sanction, only an informal warning. This incident, however, did not tarnish Gil’s reputation in the eyes of his colleagues: two years later, he was elected to the Temuco Bar Association’s Board.^[872]

A few weeks later, in September 1943, the Temuco bar was again con­fronted with a similar allegation. Emilio Inostroza was a 29-year-old ganAn (temporary agricultural worker) with a criminal record. In 1941 he was accused of murdering and robbing an elderly married couple, a case that caused significant anxiety in Temuco, and he was condemned to death. After his execution in 1943, the local press criticised the poor qual­ity of the defence that Inostroza had received from his court-appointed lawyer, the Temuco Provincial Board Director, Raul Fuentes. The court file shows indeed that Fuentes’ defence brief consisted of three lines, in which he merely appealed to the court’s “mercy.”^[873] The Temuco Bar Association Board was once more divided on this issue: whereas some Directors affirmed that Inostroza’s case was “indefensible,” others consid­ered that Fuentes’ defence had been “terrible” and “if this had been a paid lawyer, surely the defendant would have received a better defence.”^[874] Finally, however, the majority resolved that since no formal disciplinary claim had been initiated against Fuentes, the Board would not discuss the case further.^[875]

A few years after Inostroza’s execution, his gravestone in the Temuco Cemetery was progressively covered with candles, flowers, and engraved plaques thanking him for “the favours granted”: the coldblooded mur­derer had become a saint. A poem he wrote before his execution is framed and displayed in what has now become a large shrine and one of the most popular attractions of the Temuco Cemetery. In the poem, Inostroza blames his “bad defence” for his fateful ending.^[876] As in other similar cases in Latin America, the transition from “murderer to saint” is most likely explained by the unfairness surrounding the death penalty when it is exer­cised against marginalised classes, particularly when the execution involves gross injustices committed by the state.^[877] In the case of Inostroza, the empathy expressed in popular religiosity stemmed from the injustice rep­resented by the abogado de turno deficient defence.

The 1943 Temuco death penalty cases provide a particularly crude illustration of how Bar Association boards privileged professional solidar­ity over guaranteeing good quality legal services for the poor. While Chilean lawyers did not contest in theory their obligation to provide unpaid legal services, in practice, most of them were reluctant to perform this duty. The bar was, in the worst cases, inclined to cover up for its col­leagues, and at best, merely focused on controlling formalities but not the content and quality of defences. The CAC was also completely oblivious as to the quality of the service provided by social workers in the SAJ and I found no evidence of any attempt at supervising their work. This shows that the CAC’s oversight over legal aid was focused not on the clients’ needs but on the policing of internal professional hierarchies.

Hence, from its inception in the 1930s up to the 1960s, the Bar Association’s project to combine the provision of legal aid with the train­ing and supervision of lawyers was fraught with tensions, which hampered both objectives. Both interns and turno lawyers pushed back against the imposition of legal aid and the bar’s oversight, and while the CAC per­sisted and succeeded on the former, it generally compromised on the lat­ter. Whereas the unpaid work in legal aid was eventually accepted as a “natural and indispensable step” in the process of becoming a Chilean lawyer, no lawyer was ever prevented from entering the bar or expelled from it merely because of negligence in tending to the poor’s legal cas- es.^[878] Ensuring professional fraternity and internal power balances within the lawyers’ guild trumped the needs of access to justice.

Epilogue: The Crisis of Legal Aid and the Demise of the Chilean Bar Association

By the 1960s, the SAJ was having increasing difficulties providing access to justice while, simultaneously, buttressing the bar’s goals of training future lawyers and preserving the “social function” of the profession through the free labour of turno lawyers.

The SAJ’s chronic financial problems were only aggravated by the increasing needs of the CAC’s budget. This caused the stagnation and even decrease of its caseload while the demand for legal services was expanding.^[879] Budgetary restrictions also impacted the working conditions of the SAJ’s professional staff, whose numbers and salaries dwindled, impairing their supervision over law interns. Also, by the 1960s, a new generation of lawyers contested the conservative elite bar’s leadership. Middle-class and left-wing lawyers who had been excluded from represen­tation in the General Board sought to compete in the Board’s election and to reform the Bar Association’s Statute that restricted their participation. They also began to speak up against the Board in the press and resisting its “repressive” disciplinary powers. Facing this challenge, the Board was even less inclined to exercise disciplinary authority over lawyers, in gen­eral, and turno lawyers, in particular.^[880] Thus, both the quantity and the quality of legal aid work deteriorated, a situation that the SAJ and the CAC authorities increasingly acknowledged.^[881]

More profoundly, the SAJ’s delivery of legal remedies based on an indi­vidual, formalistic, and merely procedural approach was becoming con­tested in the context of a broader “crisis of the Chilean legal system.”^[882] With the growing social mobilisation of popular sectors in the increasingly polarised political climate of the Cold War in Latin America, lawyers reflected upon the unsuitability of Chilean legal institutions—including the Legal Aid Service—to respond to the needs of social and economic structural transformations in a revolutionary era.^[883] By the 1960s, the sys­tem of legal aid designed to neutralise the conflicts of the social question in the 1920s was no longer useful.

As a result, the progressive governments of Eduardo Frei Montalva (1964-1970) and Salvador Allende (1970-1973) designed the first sweep­ing proposals to reform legal aid in the late 1960s. In 1972, the Allende government presented a bill to create a “National Juridical Service” that would no longer be administered by the bar, but directly by the state.^[884] This project, that the CAC forcefully opposed, explains in part its mount­ing hostility towards the Allende government, and eventually, its enthusi­astic support for Augusto Pinochet’s military coup d’etat in 1973.^[885]

Despite its loyalty to the military regime, the CAC was taken aback by the regime’s neoliberal turn and its impact both on the legal profession and legal aid. In 1981, all professional associations, including the bar, were divested of their public functions and disciplinary jurisdiction, and transformed into merely private voluntary societies. For the CAC, this meant being deprived from substantial public funding and the SAJ.^[886] As a result, the voluntary Bar Associations are today almost irrelevant players in the legal profession and Chilean society in general.

As for legal aid, the SAJ passed to the administration of the state, as “Legal Aid Corporations.” While this new organisation sought to expand legal aid coverage in the context of neoliberal policies of “focalised” spending on the poor, they consolidated the precarious working condi­tions in this field—including the mandatory internship, which still exists— and reinforced its individualistic, formalistic, and procedural approach to the law.^[887]

And so it was that the Chilean Bar Association’s project of training and controlling lawyers through legal aid, by hampering the development of legal aid, ended up destroying the power of the Bar Association itself. While the Legal Aid Service subsisted in a new form, it remains hampered by the tensions and limitations that derive from its attempt at combining the training of new lawyers with the demands of access to justice.