Law Commons^™

The Invention And Reinvention Of Welfare Rights, William H. Simon

Faculty Scholarship

This essay contrasts the jurisprudence of welfare entitlement developed by social workers during and after the New Deal with the lawyers' welfare jurisprudence of the past two decades.

I find this contrast interesting for two reasons. First, it brings to light an episode in the intellectual history of the American welfare state that lawyers have ignored – the development of an understanding of welfare as a legal right by another profession long before Charles Reich's The New Property and the literature that followed it made such a notion current among lawyers. Second, the contrast between the social workers' and the …

The Minnesota Commitment Act Of 1982 Summary And Analysis, Eric S. Janus, Richard M. Wolfson

Faculty Scholarship

Minnesota law governing commitments has been substantially

revised and recodified in the Minnesota Commitment Act of 1982.

The prior law is repealed and the new law is substituted for it effective

August 1, 1982.

This article has three purposes. First, the significant changes in

the civil commitment law are identified and their implications explored.

Second, where appropriate, the legal background underlying

the changes is explored in order to place the changes in context.

Third, the article identifies ambiguities and inconsistencies in the

Act, posits resolutions, and suggests areas for legislative attention.

Legality, Bureaucracy, And Class In The Welfare System, William H. Simon

Faculty Scholarship

When lawyers confronted the welfare system in the 1960's, they charged it with oppressive moralism, personal manipulation, and invasion of privacy. They focused attention on the "man-in-the-house" rules that disqualified families on the basis of the mother's sexual conduct and the "midnight raids" in which welfare workers forced their way into recipients' homes searching for evidence of cohabitation.

When I represented welfare recipients from 1979 to 1981, the workers showed little interest in policing their morals or intruding on their private lives. The "man-in-the-house" rule and the practice of unannounced or nighttime visits had been repudiated. Yet the pathologies emphasized …

The Definition Of Disability In Social Security And Supplemental Security Income: Drawing The Bounds Of Social Welfare Estates, Lance Liebman

Faculty Scholarship

Federal aid to the disabled is a vast enterprise; over nine billion dollars are annually paid to five million beneficiaries. In this Article, Professor Liebman points out how the ad hoc nature of social welfare legislation and programming has resulted in a system that produces inconsistent and sometimes inequitable determinations of disability. The present system, he argues, draws significant economic and social distinctions among the disabled, as well as distinctions between the disabled and the unemployed, that have been inadequately explained and justified. By focusing on worker expectations generated by the administration of our disability programs, and on the structural …

The Reality Of Procedural Due Process – A Study Of The Implementation Of Fair Hearing Requirements By The Welfare Caseworker, Robert E. Scott

Faculty Scholarship

The constitutional mandates of procedural due process have been more sharply defined in recent years as a result of the decision of the Supreme Court in Goldberg v. Kelly. Although the full extent of the doctrine has not yet been delimited, the core proposition seems well established that in the absence of an overriding governmental interest, procedural -due process requires that an individual be accorded notice and a hearing prior to an administrative decision that would adversely affect his ability to subsist by contemporary standards. In applying this principle to the termination of public assistance payments, the Court in …

The Regulation And Administration Of The Welfare Hearing Process – The Need For Administrative Responsibility, Robert E. Scott

Faculty Scholarship

In recent years, the concept of public welfare has undergone substantial conceptual changes, the primary being a shift from the older concept of gratuity to one of statutory entitlement pursuant to the Social Security Act. This paper seeks to examine and analyze the administrative "fair hearing" as a means of effective regulation of administrative discretion and enforcement of the entitlement provisions of the federal act. Primary emphasis is placed on a comparative treatment of state hearing procedures and federal hearing regulations to determine whether the fair hearing is, at present, a viable means of insuring due process in welfare administration.