Gary Bellow; Law School Professor Gave Legal Aid to Farm Workers

Gary Bellow, 64, a Harvard Law School professor whose work with impoverished clients and farm workers helped him form the basis for a pioneering legal aid program. Bellow was appointed to the Harvard Law School faculty in 1972 and soon after founded the Clinical Program, in which law students, like medical students, acquired skills by serving clients. The program had by 1996 expanded to nearly 20 courses that provide legal services to 3,000 to 4,000 poor clients each year. The Brooklyn-born Bellow graduated with honors from Yale in 1957 and from Harvard Law School in 1960. Two years later, Bellow started a three-year stint with the District of Columbia Public Defender Service. “We discovered,” he later recalled, “that the best legal education America had to offer didn’t teach us how to get someone out of a cellblock. We figured it out ourselves and developed our own learning and teaching techniques.” Bellow later became deputy director of California Rural Legal Assistance, working with migrant farm workers, including Cesar Chavez, the leader of the United Farm Workers. In the late 1960s, Bellow worked at USC developing the law school’s clinical legal services program. In a 1996 interview with the New York Times, Bellow said that all lawyers have an obligation to make legal services available to the poor. “On a personal level, what I still get the most satisfaction from is the day-to-day work on cases with students for people who otherwise would not have a lawyer,” he said. On Thursday at a hospital in Cambridge, Mass., of complications from a heart transplant.