Law Commons^™

The Biblical Prophets As Lawyers For The Poor, Thomas L. Shaffer

Fordham Urban Law Journal

Lawyers practicing poverty law often lack mentors and role models. This author discusses how biblical figures, who served poor people, could be mentors and role models for lawyers practicing poverty law. Prophets, and particularly prophets-as-lawyers, redefine power relationships. Shaffer discusses his personal journey through out his career in using religious guidance to help him better understand his career. He also discuss his teachings to his law students of the value of learning from prophets in their legal careers.

Weaving A Safety Net: Poor Women, Welfare, And Work In The Chicken And Catfish Industries, Sherrilyn A. Ifill

University of Maryland Law Journal of Race, Religion, Gender and Class

No abstract provided.

Civil Disturbances: Battles For Justice In New York City

Fordham Urban Law Journal

This Collection contains a number of essays that are a part of Civil Disturbances, a collaborative project between artists and lawyers that commemorates various public interest law suits and social justice efforts in New York City. The project itself consists of twenty signs, each representing one specific case, that were designed to be both provoking and informative. This specific Collection contains printings of eight of the signs, as well as separate writings on issues and cases including: disabled people's accessibility to the Empire State Building, child welfare, children's rights, women and the FDNY, rights of the homeless, and welfare benefits. …

Representing Race Outside Of Explicitly Racialized Contexts, Naomi R. Cahn

Michigan Law Review

Welfare "as we know it" ended in 1996, a victim of a conservatism that views welfare recipients as lazy and immoral. One aspect of welfare that is, however, unlikely to experience radical change is child support. More vigorous child support enforcement has become an increasingly important component of federal welfare reform bills over the past two decades because of the twin hopes of fiscal and parental responsibility: first, that child support will reimburse welfare costs, and second, that fathers will take more responsibility for their children. Child support programs within the welfare system perpetuate a negative perception of poor people. …

The Two-Parent Family In The Liberal State: The Case For Selective Subsidies, Amy L. Wax

Michigan Journal of Race and Law

This Article seeks to explore in a preliminary way some questions that would be raised by the adoption of such a program. The initial issue raised by the proposal is: does the government ever have any legitimate business favoring some family forms over others? The first-pass answer would appear to be "yes." The law recognizes marriage, restricts it to persons of the opposite sex (at least for now), and confers upon married couples comparative rights and privileges-although fewer than have been enjoyed in the past. The more difficult questions are: what exactly is the nature of the government's interest in …

Awarding Child Support Against The Impoverished Parent: Straying From Statutory Guidelines And Using Ssi In Setting The Amount, Rachael K. House

Kentucky Law Journal

No abstract provided.

A Tragic View Of Poverty Law Practice, Paul R. Tremblay

University of the District of Columbia Law Review

Poverty lawyers, we are told, can do as much harm as good for their clients. This humbling theme has been a fixture in the literature and research surrounding the role of lawyers for the poor for some time. The theme captures several deep truths about poverty law. It reminds us that lawyers for the poor can, and do, exclude their clients in the work that they do, view the lives of clients through the distorted prism of law training and law practice, and tend to expend their energies on remedies and processes, largely litigation oriented, which are unlikely to lead …

An Integrated Jurisprudence And Its Influence In Fighting Poverty, Kevin L. O'Shea

University of the District of Columbia Law Review

No abstract provided.

Beyond The New Property: The Right To Become And Remain Productive, Edgar S. Cahn

University of the District of Columbia Law Review

The sixties and seventies saw the creation of new rights and the expansion of old ones in response to discrimination, disenfranchisement, and poverty. The new rights were both participatory rights' and substantive rights.2 They effected a redistribution of wealth and power. Essentially, they were rights to consume and rights to share. We called these rights "The New Property."3 As we moved from an era of sustained growth and surplus to budget deficits and trade deficits, we have been less willing to address social problems by expansion of those rights. Political and judicial receptivity to further redistribution diminished sharply.' Litigation seeking …

Health-Care Rights Of The Poor: An Introduction, Michele Melden, Michael Parks, Laura Rosenthal

University of the District of Columbia Law Review

Improving access to health care is a high priority for low-income people and their advocates. A variety of tools exist to establish legal rights to reimbursement and services. Mastery of these tools can provide dramatic improvements in the lives of the poor. This article provides a brief overview of the primary reimbursement sources for health care-Medicaid, Medicare, private insurance, and state and county indigent care programs. It covers the issues involved in and approaches to insuring the uninsured. It also explains the protection of access to health care provided by the Hill-Burton program, emergency room law, and civil rights. Basic …

Homelessness: A Historical Perspective On Modern Legislation, Mark Peters

Michigan Law Review

This Note will demonstrate how current legislative responses to homelessness are bound and crippled by the social reform theories of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Before legislators can devise more efficient remedies to tackle current problems, they must identify and transcend earlier, ineffective thinking. This requires viewing the homelessness problem· in historical perspective. Specifically, legislatures must (1) examine the origins of the legal system's underlying conceptions about homelessness, (2) understand how these conceptions undermined earlier legislation designed to deal with the crisis, and (3) isolate, and escape, the modem manifestations of these conceptions.

This Note examines the early twentieth …

The Inheritance Of Economic Status - By John A. Brittain, Michael R. Olneck

Vanderbilt Law Review

The Inheritance of Economic Status - by John A. Brittain

In the- mid-1960's and in the early 1970's, research results appeared that challenged conventional liberal beliefs about the causes and consequences of poverty. In 1966 the federal government published Equality of Educational Opportunity, a report prepared by James Coleman and his associates.' The data used in the report contained the startling result that, with some exceptions, within regions, the provision of educational resources was substantially uniform across racial and socioeconomic groups. Moreover, the data showed that what measurable differences existed between the schools attended by disadvantaged and advantaged students did …

Slumlordism As A Tort, Joseph L. Sax, Fred J. Hiestand

Michigan Law Review

The war against poverty has been fought with rather more vigor than its initiators contemplated. Thus far, however, the major engagements have taken place in the streets of Watts and Chicago, which is not quite what they had in mind. Some, who think it odd that as we pass more laws we get more lawlessness, will perhaps content themselves by observing that the feeding hand is always bitten. Those less easily satisfied have begun to see the need for adopting some legal solutions as far reaching as the problems they are designed to abate; the following article is addressed to …

Unequal Protection: Poverty And Family Law, Henry H. Foster, Doris Jonas Freed

Indiana Law Journal

No abstract provided.

Family Responsibilty Under The American Poor Laws: I, Daniel R. Mandelker

Michigan Law Review

Ever since the enactment of the statute quoted above, first passed in 1597 as part of the original Elizabethan Poor Law, the concept of family responsibility has been linked with the public relief of the poor. Today, more than three-and-a-half centuries later, the basic, residual program of poor relief has survived in the statutes of every American jurisdiction, and practically all the states still have family responsibility provisions based on the English model. Although some jurisdictions have abandoned the family responsibility requirement, the tendency in recent years seems to be toward strengthening the law where it exists.

In spite of …