Former Maine Supreme Judicial Court Justice Howard H. Dana Jr. will be honored Wednesday in Portland with the Muskie Access to Justice Award at the 20th anniversary dinner of the Muskie Fund for Legal Services.

Dana has had a long and distinguished career. After graduating from Bowdoin College in 1962, he received law and master’s degrees from Cornell, and went on to practice law at Verrill Dana between 1967 and 1993. In 1981, President Ronald Reagan appointed him a director of the Legal Services Corp., and he was appointed again by President George H.W. Bush in 1990. In 1993 he was appointed to the Maine Supreme Judicial Court. He retired in 2007.

Notable in Dana’s career – and the primary reason he is being honored – is his longstanding commitment to securing legal services for the poor.

“I think basically every lawyer learns that their function is to make sure their clients get justice,” he said. “In our country, we have two lawyers, typically – one on either side of the case – and the problem is that there aren’t enough lawyers to represent the poor. This makes for an unfair battle and an unfair system of justice.”

That sense of fairness led him to volunteer at the Cumberland County Legal Aid Clinic as a young man. He later helped Pine Tree Legal Assistance win a U.S. Supreme Court case, Maine v. Thiboutot (1980). He went on to found the Maine Bar Foundation and the Volunteer Lawyers Project, both organizations dedicated to helping low-income Mainers in legal cases, and later helped create the Justice Action Group.

Nan Heald, executive director of Pine Tree Legal Assistance, praised Dana’s contributions.

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“There have been funding crises since 1967,” she said. “The one which Justice Dana was right at the heart of was when President Reagan was elected, because Reagan wanted to end funding for legal services. Justice Dana was on the Legal Services Board and really kept that from happening.”

U.S. District Judge Jon D. Levy, a longtime colleague of Dana’s, was similarly effusive in his praise. “Howard is a truly wonderful person and a legal visionary,” he said. “I have no doubt that his groundbreaking work on the recognition of a civil right to counsel will, over time, change the face of American law.”

The award is named after Edmund S. Muskie, a Maine politician who served as governor, senator and secretary of state under President Jimmy Carter, and who ran for the Democratic presidential nomination in 1972. The program for the event states that the prize was “designed to recognize outstanding individual efforts to promote access to justice for low-income and elderly Maine residents.”

“For me it’s a significant honor,” said Dana, who was friends with Muskie despite their differing politics.


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