Edgar S. Cahn, Legal Reformer in Defense of the Poor, Dies at 86

“I really don’t imagine we’d have found this kind of a function for lawyers in the War on Poverty if it were being not for him,” Peter Edelman, a professor at the Georgetown College Legislation Heart who labored on Great Society legislation for Sen. Robert F. Kennedy, claimed in a mobile phone interview.

It was just the initial chapter in what would be a lifetime of authorized entrepreneurship. Mr. Cahn still left the federal government in 1968 to start the Citizen’s Advocate Centre, a study team focused to examining social inequities. He was between the very first in Washington to shine a light on endemic hunger in America, and to bring consideration to the ongoing plight of Native Individuals.

He and Ms. Cahn later started the Antioch Faculty of Law in Washington, a department of Antioch University, where they served as co-deans. It was the to start with lawful education application to emphasize clinical education: Learners realized by doing, often taking on instances for the duration of their initially several months of university. (The college shut in 1986, and elements of it were later on absorbed into the David A. Clarke School of Legislation at the University of the District of Columbia.)

Later on even now, in the 1980s, Mr. Cahn developed the strategy of time bucks, a method in which men and women can make credits as a result of several hours of volunteer operate, then shell out those credits to receive expert services from other volunteers — a notably practical resolution in economically deprived areas. Today, communities throughout The usa and in 40 other nations use some variety of time-banking.

“Whenever you had a issue about how to access the very poor, how to aid the bad, how to empower the very poor, how to organize the inadequate, he was the male to go to,” Ralph Nader, the shopper advocate, claimed in an interview. “There was no person in the country that had a far more transcendently strategic and tactical technique to poverty than he did.”

Edgar Stuart Cahn was born on March 23, 1935, in Manhattan and grew up in Jackson Heights, Queens. He inherited his desire in social activism from his mom and dad: His father, Edmond Cahn, taught legislation at New York College and was regarded as 1 of the main moral philosophers of his era his mother, Lenore (Lebach) Cahn, was a social activist serving more mature people in Greenwich Village.

He achieved Jean Camper as an undergraduate at Swarthmore College. She arrived from a perfectly-acknowledged family of Black civil legal rights leaders in Baltimore, and the two of them became famous on campus for their activism — as very well as for their status as a biracial pair at a college that, despite its renowned liberalism, was continue to squeamish about interracial relationship.