CLAO lawyers have handled landlord-tenant disputes, potentially the biggest source of conflict, against the Hunneman Co., Harvard's realtor. Last summer CLAO defended the man accused of stealing the Gutenberg Bible from Widener Library.

Presently Wally Sherwood, a CLAO lawyer, is defending members of OBU in the hearings on the injunction obtained by Harvard in December after OBU occupied University Hall. CLAO agreed to represent OBU, Lanckton said, when its members called the night before the hearing and did not have a lawyer. Lanckton explained that CLAO is not really funded to serve Harvard students, but that it will usually represent those students who are financially eligible.

Lanckton suggested that although Harvard has widely diverse interests, anything that CLAO does for the community is in Harvard's interest. "It's our feeling that CLAO is probably the most important interface between Harvard and the community," he said,

However, Lanckton did qualify this statement. "I don't feel any threat of being co-opted by Harvard having some purpose in the community and using CLAO to further it." he said. He pointed out that many CLAO clients are unaware of the connection to Harvard and therefore cannot credit CLAO's service to Harvard.

The Wilson Report on "The University and the City" includes CLAO in an appendix on "Harvard's efforts in urban affairs," although the report does state that CLAO is a project under the law school faculty.

Ferren says of it. "It is ironic that when the heat comes on a university it is easy to point out to the community all of the projects which happen to be going for the benefit of the local community when those projects have only happened because a few individuals in the different schools wanted them."

Next fail as CLAO enters its fifthyear and switches from a research to an operational grant it will achieve an increased permanence in the Cambridge community. At this time the staff will have to resolve some of the major problems now facing CLAO.

As the community board begins to function during the next year, its powers will become more clearly defined. If the board indeed assumes the policy-making power, then the professional staff will have to resign this function. It remains to be seen if the board and the staff will continue to agree on the nature of CLAO's service and if there is a disagreement what will happen.

It seems likely that Harvard's relations with Cambridge may become increasingly tense during the '70's. Especially as tenants become more conscious of their rights future encounters with Harvard seem probable. It has been suggested that this will all come to a head if Harvard tries to tear down apartments for the Kennedy Library.

Meanwhile, CLAO will undoubtedly be asked to represent Cambridge residents against Harvard. As the cases become more vital to Harvard's interests, CLAO will have to define its relation to Harvard more carefully.

The CLAO staff has thus far been able to avoid committing itself to any set proportion of individual cases and law reform work, due to CLAO's generous financial and personnel resources. However, if the CLAO caseload continues to grow or the resources are cut back, the staff may have to commit itself increasingly to one of the two alternatives.

Even without either of these changes the CLAO staff may find itself going increasingly in one of these directions. Lanckton observed that "the students are much more savvy now than they were three years ago," which he then defined as a greater sensitivity to law reform issues.

In discussions of the merits of individual service versus law reform a pattern seems to emerge. While the students seem to enjoy the contact with individual clients, they talk of the need to solve legal problems on a larger scale instead of spending time on individual cases. "As far as the law school is concerned a lot of students are much more radical than CLAO," Cohen said. "They think that helping people day by day is really placating."

It is staff attorney Newman who speaks of the need to handle individual cases. "You just need the day to day hawking and policing to do it," he says.

Newman admits that in a sense his position is conservative, not radical, and that the process is slow. But he says, "You have to have some kind of underlying faith in the legal system to want to change it."