WASHINGTON – U.S. Senate Democratic Whip Dick Durbin (D-IL), Ranking Member of the Senate Judiciary Committee, today received the Champion of Justice Award from the national Legal Services Corporation (LSC) in recognition of his decades of work increasing access to justice for Americans.
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LSC is the largest funder of civil legal assistance in the country, supporting 130 local legal aid organizations that provide free assistance to low-income Americans. Nationally, LSC grantees served 1.8 million people in 2024. In Illinois, LSC funds Legal Aid Chicago, Land of Lincoln Legal Aid, and Prairie State Legal Services, which served 66,927 people in 2023 and closed 28,511 cases in 2024. Unfortunately, due to limited resources, LSC grantees must turn away about 50 percent of eligible clients, and a 2022 study on the “civil justice gap” found that low-income Americans did not receive any or enough legal help for 92 percent of their substantial civil legal problems.
“Although I’ve had the honor of representing the state of Illinois in Congress, I started my legal career as a small-town attorney. Because of that work, I’m acutely aware of the wide disparity in the ability of Americans of different economic means to access the civil justice system,” said Durbin. “Legal aid changes lives for the better and improves our communities. I’ve been proud to support the LSC—and will continue to with my remaining time in Congress—and I’m grateful for this recognition.”
President Trump has threatened to eliminate the Legal Services Corporation. His Fiscal Year (FY) 2026 budget requested $21 million to be used “for the closure of the [LSC].” Such closure would be devastating for LSC grantees, which rely on LSC for nearly a third of their funding. Currently, LSC is funded at $540 million for FY2026, $20 million less than its previous funding level and far short of the $2.132 billion it requested for FY2026.
