Louis A. Craco, Who Recruited Lawyers for Poor, Dies at 86 (The New York Times)
The New York Times, February 27, 2020
Louis A. Craco, Who Recruited Lawyers for Poor, Dies at 86
Mr. Craco (pronounced CRAY-koh), a partner at Willkie Farr & Gallagher, was a founder in 1984 of Volunteers of Legal Service, a program, designed in part to make up for cutbacks by the Reagan administration in federal legal services for the poor, that more than doubled the amount of time private lawyers donated to public interest work. At 50, he was at the time the youngest president of the Association of the Bar of the City of New York….As the president of the City Bar Association, Mr. Craco was outspoken in his opposition to political influence in the selection of judges. “The independence, integrity and impartiality we expect of our courts are inevitably eroded,” he wrote in The New York Times in 1983, “in a system that forces judges to worry whether their decisions are safe or popular, to defer to well-connected clubhouse lawyers and to conform appointments of law secretaries, guardians and other officers to the dictates of patronage.”
