Law Commons^™

Me, Myself And My Digital Double: Extending Sara Greene’S Stealing (Identity) From The Poor To The Challenges Of Identity Verification, Michele E. Gilman

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Identity is an essential part of the human condition. When one’s identity is stolen or when a state rejects a citizen’s identity, the consequences can be devastating to one’s notion of selfhood as well as undermine their economic security. In Stealing (Identity) from the Poor, Sara Greene explores the serious harms suffered by low-income people who are victimized by identity theft. She explains that our plutocratic regime of identity theft laws serves the interests of wealthier Americans at the expense of those experiencing poverty.

This Essay extends Greene’s analysis and framing to the harms of identity verification systems, particularly in …

Poverty Lawgorithms A Poverty Lawyer’S Guide To Fighting Automated Decision-Making Harms On Low-Income Communities, Michele E. Gilman

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Automated decision-making systems make decisions about our lives, and those with low-socioeconomic status often bear the brunt of the harms these systems cause. Poverty Lawgorithms: A Poverty Lawyers Guide to Fighting Automated Decision-Making Harms on Low-Income Communities is a guide by Data & Society Faculty Fellow Michele Gilman to familiarize fellow poverty and civil legal services lawyers with the ins and outs of data-centric and automated-decision making systems, so that they can clearly understand the sources of the problems their clients are facing and effectively advocate on their behalf.

States Diverting Funds From The Poor, Daniel L. Hatcher

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While the United States continues to recover from the 2008 Great Recession, the country still faces unprecedented inequality as increasing numbers of poor families struggle to get by with little assistance from the government. Holes in the Safety Net: Federalism and Poverty offers a grounded look at how states and the federal government provide assistance to poor people. With chapters covering everything from welfare reform to recent efforts by states to impose work requirements on Medicaid recipients, the book avoids unnecessary jargon and instead focuses on how programs operate in practice. This timely work should be read by anyone who …

The Difference In Being Poor In Red States Versus Blue States, Michele E. Gilman

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While the United States continues to recover from the 2008 Great Recession, the country still faces unprecedented inequality as increasing numbers of poor families struggle to get by with little assistance from the government. Holes in the Safety Net: Federalism and Poverty offers a grounded look at how states and the federal government provide assistance to poor people. With chapters covering everything from welfare reform to recent efforts by states to impose work requirements on Medicaid recipients, the book avoids unnecessary jargon and instead focuses on how programs operate in practice. This timely work should be read by anyone who …

Stories Of Experience: Economic Inequality In Mediation, Robert Rubinson

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Privacy, Poverty, And Big Data: A Matrix Of Vulnerabilities For Poor Americans, Mary Madden, Michele E. Gilman, Karen Levy, Alice Marwick

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This Article examines the matrix of vulnerabilities that low-income people face as a result of the collection and aggregation of big data and the application of predictive analytics. On one hand, big data systems could reverse growing economic inequality by expanding access to opportunities for low-income people. On the other hand, big data could widen economic gaps by making it possible to prey on low-income people or to exclude them from opportunities due to biases entrenched in algorithmic decision-making tools. New kinds of “networked privacy” harms, in which users are simultaneously held liable for their own behavior and the actions …

Medicaid Maximization And Diversion: Illusory State Practices That Convert Federal Aid Into General State Revenue, Daniel L. Hatcher

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For years, states have been using illusory schemes to maximize federal aid intended for Medicaid services-and then often diverting some or all of the resulting funds to other use. And states have help. Private revenue maximization consultants are hired by states to increase Medicaid claims, often for a contingency fee. We do not know the exact amount of federal Medicaid funds that has been diverted to state revenue and private profit each year, but it is in the billions.

The states' revenue strategies take advantage of the matching-grant structure of the Medicaid program. When state funds are spent on eligible …

Poverty, Dignity, And Public Housing, Jaime Alison Lee

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Antipoverty efforts are persistently subverted by broad societal contempt for poor people. The belief that poor people are morally and behaviorally inferior, and that their personal failings are the cause of their own poverty, is a staple of American opinion polls and political rhetoric. This presumption is so widespread that it even permeates antipoverty programs, which treat poor people with disdain even as they offer aid and assistance.

Income discrimination creates not just social stigma, but legal inequalities. The Supreme Court recognized some forty years ago that welfare law promoted wealth-based Constitutional inequalities, and responded by invoking the doctrines of …

Forgotten Fathers, Daniel L. Hatcher

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Poor fathers like John are largely forgotten, written off as a subset of the unworthy poor. These fathers struggle with poverty – often with near hopelessness – within multiple systems in which they are either entangled or overlooked, such as child-support and welfare programs, family courts, the criminal justice system, housing programs, and the healthcare, education, and foster-care systems. For these impoverished fathers, the “end of men” is often not simply a question for purposes of discussion but a fact that is all too real. In the instances in which poor fathers are not forgotten, they are targeted as causes …

The Poverty Defense, Michele E. Gilman

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Poverty is correlated with crime, but it is widely assumed that it should not be a defense. In the 1970s, Judge David Bazelon challenged this assumption, proposing a rotten social background defense, that is, how growing up under circumstances of severe deprivation can subsequently impact a criminal defendant's mental state and actions. Relatedly, other theorists have posited that poverty should be a defense to crime based on poverty's coercive aspects or because society forfeits its right to condemn when it tolerates significant economic inequality. Critics counter that a poverty defense should not be adopted because it is not only inconsistent …

Purpose Vs. Power: Parens Patriae And Agency Self-Interest, Daniel L. Hatcher

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The purpose of human service agencies to serve vulnerable populations such as abused and neglected children derives from the common law doctrine of parens patriae, embodying the inherent role of the state as parent of the country. However, along with this foundational purpose, the parens patriae doctrine also provides power that is illusive to public knowledge and oversight. To maintain their cloak of power, the very agencies created to fulfill the parens patriae obligations — to protect the rights of children — have systematically battled the children’s efforts to claim those rights as their own. Also, the agencies have now …

Don't Forget Dad: Addressing Women's Poverty By Rethinking Forced And Outdated Child Support Policies, Daniel L. Hatcher

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In the dialogues regarding reducing poverty among women, especially mothers, the inextricably linked issues surrounding low-income men must be simultaneously considered. In social policy addressing women’s poverty, poor fathers have too often been considered primarily as an enemy to be pursued rather than a fellow victim of poverty’s wrath, and potential partner towards the cure. We want someone to blame, and many assume that poor single mothers are best served by always being encouraged — and even forced — to pursue the noncustodial fathers for financial support through adversarial means. Mothers applying for public assistance are forced to sue the …

Poverty And Communitarianism: Toward A Community Based Welfare System, Michele E. Gilman

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This Article analyzes how communitarian political theory addresses poverty and impacts American social welfare programs. For several decades, communitarian and liberal philosophers have debated how best to achieve justice through their competing notions of personhood. Whereas liberal theorists stress the values of individual autonomy and state neutrality, communitarians assert that people are socially constituted and that liberalism therefore pays too little attention to the value of community. Yet despite their attempts to articulate a superior form of justice, communitarian theorists either ignore or misunderstand issues related to poverty, as this Article explains. Nevertheless, their insights are helpful in thinking about …

Breaking The Cycle Of Defeat For 'Deadbroke' Noncustodial Parents Through Advocacy On Child Support Issues, Daniel L. Hatcher, Hannah Lieberman

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The child support system is not serving low-income families well. Custodial parents are not receiving the child support they need. Enforcement of child support for lowincome parents receiving welfare primarily benefits the state because the payments are owed to the government. Low-income noncustodial parents face unrealistically high child support orders and large arrearages take so much of their wages that they cannot support themselves. They go to jail-often recurrently-because they cannot meet their obligations and thereby lose the opportunity to keep a job. Their driver's licenses are suspended because they have not paid their support. To evade this punitive cycle, …

Legal Images Of Motherhood: Conflicting Definitions From Welfare "Reform," Family And Criminal Law, Jane C. Murphy

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Part I of this Article explores the traditional idealized view of motherhood that child placement statutes and court decisions reflect. These laws include statutes and case law in custody disputes between parents and in child protection proceedings under civil and criminal laws where the dispute is between the parent and the state. Part II contrasts the legal construct of motherhood that child placement laws embody with the legal image of mothers in child support and welfare law.

Part III examines the impact of these conflicting images of motherhood on a particular group of mothers -- battered women. Battered women illuminate …

The Efficient Consumer Form Contract: Law And Economics Meet The Real World, Michael I. Meyerson

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"Law and economics" has been hailed by its supporters as the only intellectually valid means for analyzing legal issues. Its critics have dismissed law and economics as amoral and biased against the poor. Ironically, each side in this frequently acrimonious debate has much to offer those in the opposing camp. This Article reflects a modest attempt to bridge the chasm.

One need not believe that money is everything in order to believe that the effect a given legal rule has on total societal wealth is relevant in decisionmaking. But this admission does not consign one to a legal world where …