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American National Biography Online Sparer, Edward V. (21 Mar. 1928-21 June 1983), founder of community legal services, was born in New York City, the son of Marcus Sparer, a retail merchant, and Ada Cohen. He graduated from Benjamin Franklin High School in New York City in 1946 and that year entered the City College of New York. While in college he joined the third-party presidential campaign of Henry Wallace and in 1947 went to the South to organize textile workers for Wallace. He encountered poverty, violence, racism, and suppression of free speech, which would motivate him for the rest of his life. Upon returning to City College he became interested in labor organizing. Sparer left school in 1949 without receiving a degree. The following year he married a classmate, Tanya Schecter; they had two daughters and a son. After two years (1951-1953) in the U.S. Army, Sparer attended Brooklyn Law School, where he served as editor in chief of the law review. Upon graduating in 1959, he worked as a lawyer for the International Ladies Garment Worker's Union. In the early 1960s the Ford Foundation began Mobilization for Youth (MFY), a program that sought to address problems of juvenile delinquency by organizing communities to create economic opportunities. Sparer, an institution builder, persuaded the foundation to create a legal services program. MFY Legal Services, founded in 1963 with Sparer as its first director, was the first neighborhood legal services program in the nation and became the model for the effective and controversial federal legal services program. In 1965 he founded the Columbia University Law School's Center on Social Welfare Policy and Law, the first of dozens of national support centers for legal services work. As a lawyer, Sparer continued his early commitment to community organizing. In representing welfare clients he encouraged creation of local welfare rights organizations that, in 1964, led to the creation of the National Welfare Rights Organization. He served as general counsel to this group until his death. In 1970 Sparer created the Health Law Project at the University of Pennsylvania School of Law. The project, under the guidance of a board of directors, included doctors and sociologists as well as lawyers and represented health care consumers seeking access to high quality, affordable health care. It conducted empirical research, produced books and studies, and trained students in law, medicine, and sociology. Sparer understood that the law is fact-sensitive and moderately plastic. He developed theories to support claims that poor people have basic rights protected by the Social Security Act and the Constitution. King v. Smith (1968) struck down the common "man in the house" rules that denied aid to poor children whose mothers dated men. The U.S. Supreme Court held that states could not terminate aid to poor children because their mother had a boyfriend on the grounds that federal law defined "parent" as a person with a legal obligation to support children, and boyfriends are not legally obligated to support poor women and their children. Since then thousands of cases have required that states administer grant programs in accordance with the provisions of federal statutes. The Court also accepted the arguments, initially developed by Sparer, that the right to aid should not be contingent upon the sacrifice of constitutionally protected liberties. Shapiro v. Thompson (1969) held that aid could not be denied to poor people who had exercised their constitutionally protected right to travel from state to state. The Court in Goldberg v. Kelly (1970) recognized the argument that aid could not be terminated without notice of the reasons and an opportunity to protest termination. Sparer was a gifted teacher and organizer. He taught at Yale Law School from 1967 to 1969 and at the University of Pennsylvania Law School from 1969 until his death. In addition, he was a wise mentor to generations of lawyers, civil rights activists, social workers, doctors, nurses, midwives, and poor people seeking progressive social change. Sparer's legacy of institution building lives on in the Edward V. Sparer Public Interest Law Fellowship program at Brooklyn Law School, which provides opportunities and guidance to students seeking to do work in the Sparer tradition. Sparer died at his family home in Woodstock, New York. Bibliography Sparer published many articles and essays, including "Gordian Knots: The Situation of Health Care Advocacy for the Poor Today," Clearinghouse Review 15 (May 1981): 1-23, in which he discusses the difficulties in obtaining decent health care for the poor. In "Fundamental Human Rights, Legal Entitlements, and the Social Struggle: A Friendly Critique of the Critical Legal Studies Movement," Stanford Law Review 36 (Jan. 1984): 509-74, he synthesizes the critical critique of rights with efforts to obtain and enforce legal rights for vulnerable people. A comprehensive bibliography of Sparer's writings as well as several tributes written on the occasion of his death are in the University of Pennsylvania Law Review 132 (1984). Martha F. Davis, Brutal Need: Lawyers and the Welfare Rights Movement, 1960-1973 (1993), provides a good account of Sparer's welfare rights work. Sylvia A. Law Citation: Sylvia A. Law. "Sparer, Edward V."; http://www.anb.org/articles/11/11-01192.html; American National Biography Online Feb. 2000. Access Date: Copyright (c) 2000 American Council of Learned Societies. Published by Oxford University Press. All rights reserved. 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