Christie Marra, L'91

Before her first client, before her Richmond Law degree, before the externship, the undergraduate years at the University of Virginia, before even those routine high school lessons in history and government, the seeds for Christie Marra’s future career in legal aid were planted at her family’s dinner table. A child of teachers, Marra remembers her parents’ thoughtful discussions of poverty and income inequality and the way these adversely affected children and their educations and opportunities.

“These conversations had more of an impact on my future than anything else,” says Marra. “This is where my awareness of poverty issues came from initially.”

Today, Marra, L’91, is a family law and housing law staff attorney with the Virginia Poverty Law Center in Richmond who has spent her entire 23-year legal career in determined pursuit of equal access to civil justice for Virginia’s poor and low-income residents. And this year, she is the recipient of the Virginia State Bar’s Legal Aid Award, which recognizes Virginia’s legal aid attorneys for “advocacy, quality of service, and impact beyond their service area.”

If you imagine Marra, however, as a crusader, someone who sacrificed potentially less demanding and more lucrative career paths out of a noble commitment, she quickly scotches that misconception. Quite simply, she loves what she does. To her, it is the essence of what it means to practice law, to see how our legal system — when it works its best, when it works for everyone — can literally change lives.

“If you are going to work as a lawyer,” she says, “this is as good as it gets.”

Nevertheless, to work in poverty law is to battle day after day at the front lines of what “income inequality” really means. Poverty is a daily reality for tens of millions of Americans — men and women, parents and children, the elderly, veterans, the disabled, the employed, homeowners — that remains largely invisible to the rest of the country. More than 46 million Americans fall below the federally designated poverty line: $11,670 for an individual, $23,850 for a family of four, numbers calculated according to a decades-old formula widely criticized for, among other shortcomings, failing to accurately reflect today’s actual costs of living. Many more people live one small catastrophe — an injury, a car repair — from tumbling below that line as well.

The problems of poverty are complex and not amenable to sound-bite solutions, and a growing body of research is offering evidence that living in poverty is itself a hazard to mental and physical health, that being poor can put you at greater risk for disease, affect your cognitive abilities, limit your capacity for decision making, and even alter your physiology at the level of gene expression.

What poverty also does, at the level of policy making and in the courtroom, is make the poor de facto second-class citizens of our civil legal system. In the courtroom, if in theory justice is impartial, in practice money buys advantage. If in theory, based on income, more than 53 million Americans would qualify for legal aid services, in practice, studies show, barely 20 percent of the legal needs of the poor are met, because there are not enough legal aid or pro bono attorneys to provide those services.

“All of us learned in law school that our justice system is based upon the fact that both sides are represented — that is what leads to fairness and justice,” says Jay Speer, executive director of the VPLC. “If there are no lawyers available for those who cannot afford them, then you don’t have fairness and justice.”

“With the civil justice system there are lots of rules, and if you are not a lawyer, you don’t know those rules,” says Marra. “And if the other side has an attorney, and you don’t have an attorney, then your ability to tell your story to the judge gets blocked.”

Or, as Justice Earl Johnson Jr. of the California Court of Appeals put it, “The poor have access to the American courts in the same sense that Christians had access to the lions when they were dragged, unarmed, into a Roman arena.”

The quote is offered by John Whitfield, executive director and general counsel at Blue Ridge Legal Services, the legal aid office that serves a swath of Virginia from Winchester to Roanoke. A colleague of Marra’s since she began her legal career, Whitfield says, “If we want everyone in our society, including the poor, to play by the rules and be good citizens, then the rules and the laws have to work for everyone, they have to protect everyone. If we say our society is going to be fair and equal under the law, then we have to make sure that everybody has that equality.”

And, as Marra notes, “A lot of people involved in the legislative process don’t really know low-income people.” Most lawmakers have never personally experienced poverty. They don’t live in poor neighborhoods. And, as is true for all of us, most of the people they know — friends, neighbors, fellow lawmakers, the people they attend religious services with and their kids go to school with — are probably a lot like them.

The particular issues that poor and low-income people face, therefore, may be at best unfamiliar to legislators. At worst, lawmakers may be as susceptible as anyone else to myths and negative stereotypes about poverty.

“I don’t think enough people realize how many barriers low-income people face day after day after day,” says Marra. She cites the example of one former client, a working mother of three. She had been abused as a teenager and suffered from mental health problems. She depended on public transportation and had a child with special health needs who needed to attend a feeding clinic. The family lived in public housing where, the mother told Marra, it was unsafe for her children to go outside. Still, she was attempting to complete online classes that could lead to a better job.
“We don’t have to think about these things,” says Marra. “We have cars and licenses. We can let our children go out and play.”

—

Poverty law wasn’t particularly in Marra’s plans in her undergraduate years studying literature at the University of Virginia. In fact, in the time-honored tradition of English majors everywhere, Marra wasn’t sure what she wanted to do with her future. She contemplated a master’s degree in education before ending up at Richmond Law, where she still remained uncertain about her path. A Ph.D. in political science was in the running until, in her third year, at the suggestion of a friend, she undertook an externship with Central Virginia Legal Aid in Richmond. “You will fall in love with it,” predicted her friend.

“And he was right,” says Marra. She liked the staff and loved the work. During her externship, she was immediately working with clients, attending administrative unemployment compensation hearings (which do not require an attorney) before the Virginia Employment Commission.

“It gave me a taste of what clients were like, what being an attorney was like, what legal aid was like,” says Marra, and the experience set her on course. She applied only for legal aid positions, and, following graduation, ended up in the legal aid office in Castlewood, in far southwest Virginia.

For a young woman from Long Island, it was a radical transition to the rural Appalachia of coal-mining country, where trailers dot the hillsides and the town’s entire population would fill less than a third of the seats in Richmond’s Robins Center. Although the work was fulfilling, Marra returned to Richmond when a position opened in the legal aid office where she’d externed.

For the next 13 years, Marra worked at Central Virginia Legal Aid. “Most of that time I specialized in family law, mostly representing victims and survivors of domestic violence,” says Marra. In her final two years, she became increasingly involved with landlord-tenant law.

Over her years at Central Virginia Legal Aid, Marra had been encouraged more than once to apply as positions came open at the Virginia Poverty Law Center, which offers training, assistance and support to the state’s legal aid offices and pursues policy advocacy at the legislative level, but she hadn’t been ready to step back from her daily work with clients. After 13 years as a practicing legal aid attorney, however, and despite her love for the work, she’d grown frustrated by seeing her clients facing the same issues again and again.

“I became very discouraged by the fact that no matter how hard we tried, no matter how much we put in to certain cases, there were systemic barriers placed in front of our clients,” she says.
She joined the Virginia Poverty Law Center in 2004; after 10 years she seems, if anything, more passionate about her work than the day she arrived, famously tireless, ambitious, good humored and determined.

“Christie has charged into so many issues,” says Whitfield of Blue Ridge Legal Services. “It is amazing to me how many balls she keeps in the air as she has worked on changing so many things.”

And state senator Jill Holtzman Vogel (R-District 27) jokes that during the General Assembly, “I would think she slept on the third floor. That’s where my office is, and I see her there all the time. Late, late, late in the day Christie has found time to come by and meet with me.”

Marra’s strength? “Patience is everything,” she says.

Patience is what goes into building relationships with legislators who have come to rely upon her as a dependable and trustworthy expert. It goes into forming coalitions with stakeholders, even those who might not see eye-to-eye with her on every issue. And it goes into a willingness to persevere, sometimes year after year, in pursuit of the goals she sets.

On the wall by her office door is a whiteboard marked “2014 Goals,” with a list of six items below it, each written in a different color of ink. To an outsider, the language — “inclusionary zoning,” “kinship diversion,” “on-line NFD” — is elliptical and opaque. To Marra, each item represents, in some cases, the work of years.

Take the first one: “Make on-line NFD military friendly.” The NFD stands for “no-fault divorce,” but it’s the “on-line” piece that has been so long in the realizing that Marra puts its earliest incarnation at a vague “many years ago.” The idea was to make it possible for Virginians seeking a simple, uncontested, no-fault divorce, to complete much of the process online.

“There are lots of people who can’t afford to pay an attorney to get divorced from someone who, in some cases, they haven’t even seen in years,” says Marra. “And they’re stuck. It holds them up for everything from taxes and eligibilities for benefits to getting remarried. For survivors of domestic violence, it ties them to that person who abused them.”

On Marra’s first attempt to introduce the legislation, it “didn’t even make it out of subcommittee.” But through patient work and coalition-building, the bill finally passed in 2012. It’s still on the list, says Marra, because “we keep trying to add to it, to tweak it,” and this year’s goal is to make the program military-friendly.

And then there was the push to give victims of domestic violence, if they had a protective order or an order convicting their abuser, the right to terminate a lease early. That one stayed on the list for seven years until last year when it finally passed.

Marra is active in foster care issues, in landlord-tenant and affordable housing issues, and in domestic and family policy. She prepares thoroughly, using the months between legislative sessions to lay the groundwork for the frenetic weeks of the General Assembly.

“She is incredibly integrated into the legislative process,” says Vogel. “It is one thing to be present and to stand before committee and say this is our position, but Christie is really forward-moving and really integrated and very engaged at the beginning and all the way through.”

Adds Whitfield, “She is highly effective with the General Assembly because she has developed a strong rapport with legislators from both sides of the aisle so that they will listen to her, respect her, and respect that she has expertise and knowledge. If she is proposing something, they are going to consider it.”

In the unlikely event she is ever at a loss for new items for her whiteboard, a shelf in her office holds some 30 spiral-bound notebooks, the kind familiar to everyone from their school days, which are filled with ideas, notes, names and contact information, details of meetings — a repository to which she can turn at any time for reminders of what yet needs to be done.
And what yet needs to be done is still plenty, the needs great. But after her more than two decades in poverty law, Marra seems undaunted, her datebook filled with a slate of more meetings, conversations, and coalitions to be formed.

“Once I started,” says Marra, “I knew I was in it for the long haul.”