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Promoting Marriage Experimentation: A Class Act?, Julie Nice
Promoting Marriage Experimentation: A Class Act?, Julie Nice
Julie A. Nice
For nearly sixty years, the federal government maintained a policy of preventing or discouraging receipt of welfare by two-parent families. In its massive overhaul of welfare in 1996, Congress reversed course and declared its new policy was to promote marriage for welfare recipients. With great fan fare, the Bush Administration pledged $1.5 billion to support a healthy marriage initiative for recipients of Temporary Assistance to Needy Families. As Professor Nice reveals, however, the marriage promotion policy is not what it seems to be. For example, in the 2005 Deficit Reduction Act, Congress quietly reinstated a marriage penalty by authorizing sanctions …
The New Private Law: An Introduction, Julie Nice
The New Private Law: An Introduction, Julie Nice
Julie A. Nice
This essay is an introduction to a Symposium on The New Private Law. Professor Nice defines New Private Law as including deregulation, decentralization, privatization, and contractualization, and as reflecting a normative regime that both recognizes a distinction between public and private domains and prefers the ordering of the private market to that of public decision-makers. She argues the preference for the private domain seems, at least, to tolerate inequality, and at worst, to reify existing power hierarchies. At the specific level, she describes the debate over privatization of welfare, with proponents claiming it costs less because of greater flexibility and …
Welfare Servitude, Julie Nice
Welfare Servitude, Julie Nice
Julie A. Nice
In Welfare Servitude, Professor Nice considers whether mandating work as a condition for receiving welfare violates the Thirteenth Amendment’s prohibition of involuntary servitude and also explores the recurring intersection between race and class. She first describes the redoubling of efforts to increase enforcement of welfare work requirements once racial minorities were no longer excluded from receiving welfare benefits. Next she analyzes judicial decisions construing what constitutes involuntary servitude, including historic cases addressing indentured servitude, the padrone system, peonage, and the surety system, as well as modern cases challenging various welfare work requirements. Professor Nice distills three doctrinal types of involuntary …