Social Welfare Law Commons^™

The Empire Of The Lone Mother: Parental Rights, Child Welfare Law, And State Restructuring, Hester Lessard

Osgoode Hall Law Journal

This article uses the Supreme Court of Canada's decision in G.(J.) v. New Brunswick to frame a discussion of the historical and ideological character of Canadian child welfare regimes on the nature and experience of women’s citizenship within the liberal political order and, in particular, within the current neo-liberal restructuring of welfare provision. The article also analyzes traditional understandings of the political character of child welfare in terms of state intervention and non-intervention, by placing the state ordering of parent-child relations in the context of larger issues of colonialism, gendered parenting discourses, and the linkage between child neglect and poverty. …

Rights Of Inequality: Rawlsian Justice, Equal Opportunity, And The Status Of The Family, Justin Schwartz

Justin Schwartz

Is the family subject to principles of justice? In A Theory of Justice, John Rawls includes the (monogamous) family along with the market and the government as among the "basic institutions of society" to which principles of justice apply. Justice, he famously insists, is primary in politics as truth is in science: the only excuse for tolerating injustice is that no lesser injustice is possible. The point of the present paper is that Rawls doesn't actually mean this. When it comes to the family, and in particular its impact on fair equal opportunity (the first part of the the Difference …

Lena Olive Smith: A Minnesota Civil Rights Pioneer, Ann Juergens

Faculty Scholarship

Lena Olive Smith and the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) created a spirited partnership in the public interest during the 1920s and 1930s. Throughout their long collaboration, this woman lawyer, her clients, and the Minneapolis branch of a national grassroots organization faced similar challenges: to stay solvent, to end segregation and increase equality, and to live with dignity. This article is divided into four sections. The first three roughly correspond with stages in Smith’s life and work. Part II briefly chronicles Smith’s first thirty six years, 1885 to 1921, as a single African-American woman in the …

Pro Bono Publico Representation Of The Poor: The Good As Enemy Of The Best, Rob Atkinson

Scholarly Publications

No abstract provided.

Poverty, Welfare Reform, And The Meaning Of Disability, Jennifer Pokempner, Dorothy E. Roberts

All Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Competing Frameworks For Assessing Contemporary Holocaust-Era Claims, Vivian Grosswald Curran

Articles

There are many angles from which to perceive the contemporary holocaust-era claims. In 1997, Time magazine quoted Elie Wiesel as saying that, [i]f all the money in all the Swiss banks were turned over, it would not bring back the life of one Jewish child. But the money is a symbol. It is part of the story. If you suppress any part of the story, it comes back later, with force and violence.

Wiesel touches on two perspectives: first, what has been described as litigating the holocaust, with all that that implies about the law's questionable capacity to adjudicate issues …

Unemployment Insurance And Wealth Redistribution, Gillian Lester

Faculty Scholarship

This Article evaluates the merit of liberalizing unemployment insurance eligibility as a means to achieve progressive wealth redistribution-an idea that has recently gained popularity among policymakers and legal scholars. Unemployment insurance (UI) provides temporary, partial wage replacement to workers who suffer unexpected job loss, but it tends to exclude workers who have very low wages or hours of work, or who quit for reasons considered "personal" (for example, to accommodate family demands). Professor Lester argues that while redistribution to workers who are poor or who have caregiving obligations is a desirable goal, expanding UI is a poor way to do …