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2023 Champions For Justice 1-27-2023, Roger Williams University School Of Law

School of Law Conferences, Lectures & Events

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Can You Hear Me Now?: Making Participatory Governance Work For The Poor, Jaime Alison Lee

All Faculty Scholarship

Participatory governance engages people who are affected by a problem in the process of solving it. A participatory-governance approach to inner-city crime, for example, might include local residents in the process of designing a community-policing program. In recent decades, courts, legislatures, administrative agencies, and other institutions all have used participatory-governance approaches to tackle complex problems of law and public policy.

Some herald the potential for participatory-governance schemes to improve legal and policy outcomes, increase institutional accountability, empower marginalized groups, and further democratic ideals of self-determination and equality. Yet participatory-governance schemes can also promote the capture of public power by private …

Pledge Your Body For Your Bread: Welfare, Drug Testing, And The Inferior Fourth Amendment, Jordan C. Budd

Law Faculty Scholarship

Proposals to subject welfare recipients to periodic drug testing have emerged over the last three years as a significant legislative trend across the United States. Since 2007, over half of the states have considered bills requiring aid recipients to submit to invasive extraction procedures as an ongoing condition of public assistance. The vast majority of the legislation imposes testing without regard to suspected drug use, reflecting the implicit assumption that the poor are inherently predisposed to culpable conduct and thus may be subject to class-based intrusions that would be inarguably impermissible if inflicted on the less destitute. These proposals are …

A Fourth Amendment For The Poor Alone: Subconstitutional Status And The Myth Of The Inviolate Home, Jordan C. Budd

Law Faculty Scholarship

For much of our nation’s history, the poor have faced pervasive discrimination in the exercise of fundamental rights. Nowhere has the impairment been more severe than in the area of privacy. This Article considers the enduring legacy of this tradition with respect to the Fourth Amendment right to domestic privacy. Far from a matter of receding historical interest, the diminution of the poor’s right to privacy has accelerated in recent years and now represents a powerful theme within the jurisprudence of poverty. Triggering this development has been a series of challenges to aggressive administrative practices adopted by localities in the …

Book Review, Chad J. Schatzle

Scholarly Works

Welfare's Forgotten Past: A Socio-Legal History of the Poor Law is a timely reminder of society's legal duty to the poor. In an era of global economic turmoil, with recent welfare reform and heated debates over the extension of unemployment benefits here in the United States, it is easy to forget that laws for the relief of poverty have roots reaching back more than 400 years. Author Lorie Charlesworth, Reader in Law and History at Liverpool John Moores University, focuses her book on the poor law-a historical, English system derived largely from the seventeenth-century laws of settlement and removal, which …

Stratification Of The Welfare Poor: Intersections Of Gender, Race & "Worthiness" In Poverty Discourse And Policy, Bridgette Baldwin

Faculty Scholarship

This Article analyzes the historical, cultural and legal treatments and representations of poor black women from Progressive Era philanthropic aid to early "work-to-welfare" reform protocol. When black women serve as the case study for a larger examination of social policy issues we see that welfare was rarely meant to remedy the structural crunch of poverty. Working class black women have been at the center of the construction of the poor and serve as the designation to determine which people deserve to be compensated for being poor.

Furthermore, the Author discusses both the ramifications and rationale of why the government never …

Funny Money: How Federal Education Funding Hurts Poor And Minority Students, Cassandra Jones Havard

All Faculty Scholarship

Neither race nor class alone can predict educational achievement. However, in America, disparities in funding for education may be an impediment to educational opportunity for disadvantaged youth. At the crux of the Nation's achievement gap among minority children is the question of the how states should allocate federal education funds, and how local school districts should use those monies. Educators have long recognized that the socioeconomic circumstances of many public school students present great educational challenges. Since 1965, Congress has authorized the use of federal funds by local school districts to remedy the achievement gap.

Part I of this Article …

Regulating The Poor And Encouraging Charity In Times Of Crisis: The Poor Laws And The Statute Of Charitable Uses, James J. Fishman

Elisabeth Haub School of Law Faculty Publications

National crises such as September 11th and Hurricane Katrina resulted in an unprecedented outpouring of charitable generosity by Americans, which was encouraged by the government through tax incentives. This paper examines an earlier period of crisis, Tudor England (1485-1603), where the state encouraged philanthropy as a tool of social and political policy. Certain charitable activities were favored and others disadvantaged to spur private sector resources to resolve public problems.

The article discusses the evolution of the laws regulating the poor, which culminated in the Poor Law Legislation of 1601, a process that developed attitudes toward the poor and concepts of …

Community Economic Development Under Protest, Ngai Pindell

Scholarly Works

Storming Caesars Palace casts the War on Poverty in a new light to illustrate the "rich potential of a poor women's movement for economic justice." Orleck challenges "scholars and policymakers [to] rethink the conventional wisdom that the War on Poverty was a failure." Through "seeing and hearing from welfare mothers in all their complex, contradictory humanity," she hopes to unsettle existing ideas of effective anti-poverty strategies. Orleck is understandably troubled by the glacial pace of progress in the lives of poor people in America, concluding that "after a cacophonous, half-century debate about America's so-called underclass, few creative or genuinely new …

Three Generations Of Welfare Mothers Are Enough: A Disturbing Return To Eugenics In The Recent "Workfare" Law, Nicole Huberfeld

Law Faculty Scholarly Articles

In this Article, Nicole Huberfeld examines recent changes in the welfare system, and considers whether these changes are consistent with the stated goals of the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act of 1996. Turning to the history of “workfare,” Huberfeld reveals parallels between the reasoning of its proponents, and that of eugenicists. She argues that workfare mirrors eugenics theory because its proponents are imposing particular white, middleclass values upon the poor as a condition to providing them benefits: Through her comparison of workfare and eugenics, Huberfeld cautions against legislation that seeks to regulate the private conduct and personal decisions …

Medicaid Managed Care And Disability Discrimination Issues, Mary Crossley

Articles

This article examines issues potentially raised under the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) by states' decisions whether and how to include disabled Medicaid recipients in the massive shift towards Medicaid managed care. Part II briefly examines the special issues that disabled Medicaid recipients pose with respect to managed care enrollment. These include issues of cost, quality, access, and program design and implementation. Part III describes various approaches that state programs have taken or are proposing to take with respect to the enrollment of disabled Medicaid recipients in managed care. These approaches range from simply excluding the SSI population from managed …

Welfare Reform, Child Care Costs, And Taxes: Delivering Increased Work-Related Child Care Benefits To Low-Income Families, Mary L. Heen

Law Faculty Publications

This Article focuses specifically on.tax-transfer integration of work-related child care assistance. Part I discusses the current child care assistance available to low-income workers through direct transfer programs and through the income tax system. Part II describes the need for increased child care funding and the failure of current welfare reform proposals to meet that need. Part III examines the theoretical and practical issues that must be addressed before the tax system is used as a mechanism for delivering increased child care assistance. to low-income families. Part IV critiques a proposed funding mechanism that would redirect tax benefits to lower income …

Aspirations And Reality In The Law And Politics Of Health Care Reform: Examining A Symposium On (E)Qual(Ity) Care For The Poor, Ann C. Mcginley

Scholarly Works

Although the poor had suffered from insufficient health care for years, it was only when the middle class felt the economic pinch that health care reform moved to the top of the national agenda. In this way, the poor, a group with little political power, could benefit from the enormous political power of the middle class. In the Fall of 1992, it appeared that it was time for the poor to consider building a coalition with the middle class to work for universal coverage and improved quality of care. Yet, many questions remained about whether a coalition would benefit the …

Litigating State Constitutional Rights To Happiness And Safety: A Strategy For Ensuring The Provision Of Basic Needs To The Poor, Bert B. Lockwood Jr., R. Collins Owens Iii, Grace A. Severyn

Faculty Articles and Other Publications

Faced with the dead-end nature of attempting to use the United States Constitution to develop enforceable minimum standards of care for the poor, the poor and their advocates have looked to state constitutional and statutory law for the protection of basic needs. Compared to the textual wasteland of the Federal Constitution, state constitutions have much to offer. Many state constitutions contain substantive provisions dealing explicitly with poverty, housing, shelter, and nutrition. Many state constitutions also include declarations that set out as inalienable the right to seek and/or obtain safety and the right to pursue and/or obtain happiness. This article chronicles …