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Full-Text Articles in Law
(Anti)Poverty Measures Exposed, Francine J. Lipman
(Anti)Poverty Measures Exposed, Francine J. Lipman
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Few economic indicators have more salience and pervasive financial impact on everyday lives in the United States than poverty measures. Nevertheless, policymakers, researchers, advocates, and legislators generally do not understand the details of poverty measure mechanics. These detailed mechanics shape and reshape poverty measures and the too often uninformed responses and remedies. This Article will build a bridge from personal portraits of families living in poverty to the resource allocations that failed them by exposing the specific detailed mechanics underlying the Census Bureau’s official (OPM) and supplemental poverty measures (SPM). Too often, when we confront the problem of poverty, the …
Heal The Suffering Children: Fifty Years After The Declaration Of War On Poverty, Francine J. Lipman, Dawn Davis
Heal The Suffering Children: Fifty Years After The Declaration Of War On Poverty, Francine J. Lipman, Dawn Davis
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Fifty years ago, President Lyndon B. Johnson declared the War on Poverty. Since then, the federal tax code has been a fundamental tool in providing financial assistance to poor working families. Even today, however, thirty-two million children live in families that cannot support basic living expenses, and sixteen million of those live in extreme poverty. This Article navigates the confusing requirements of an array of child-related tax benefits including the dependency exemption deduction, head of household filing status, the Earned Income Tax Credit, and the Child Tax Credit. Specifically, this Article explores how altering the definition of a qualifying child …
How The Poor Got Cut Out Of Banking, Mehrsa Baradaran
How The Poor Got Cut Out Of Banking, Mehrsa Baradaran
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The United States currently has two banking systems — one for the rich, one for the poor. It wasn’t always this way. Throughout U.S. history, the government has enlisted certain banking institutions to serve the needs of the poor and offer low cost credit to enable low-income Americans to escape poverty. Credit unions, savings and loans and Morris Banks are three prominent examples of government-supported institutions with a specific focus of helping the poor. Unfortunately, these institutions are no longer fulfilling their missions and high-cost, usurious, and sometimes predatory check-cashers and payday lenders have quickly filled the void. These fringe …
Access To Tax Injustice, Francine J. Lipman
Narrative Preferences And Administrative Due Process, Jason A. Cade
Narrative Preferences And Administrative Due Process, Jason A. Cade
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This Article illustrates, through sociolinguistic analysis, how an adjudicator’s biases against certain narrative styles can influence his or her assessments of credibility, treatment of parties, and decision-making in the administrative law setting. Poverty lawyers have long observed that many claimants in the administrative state continue to face procedural and discursive obstacles. Applying insights from a growing field of inter-disciplinary research, including conversation analysis, linguistics, and cognitive studies, this Article builds upon those observations by more precisely exploring through a case study of an unemployment insurance benefits hearing how structural and narrative biases can work to deny an applicant due process …
Community Economic Development Under Protest, Ngai Pindell
Community Economic Development Under Protest, Ngai Pindell
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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 …