Law Commons^™

The Poverty Law Education Of Charles Reich, Felicia Kornbluh, Karen Tani

All Faculty Scholarship

This essay, written for a symposium on the life and legacy of Charles Reich, explores how Reich came to be interested in the field of poverty law and, specifically, the constitutional rights of welfare recipients. The essay emphasizes the influence of two older women in Reich’s life: Justine Wise Polier, the famous New York City family court judge and the mother of one of Reich’s childhood friends, and Elizabeth Wickenden, a contemporary of Polier’s who was a prominent voice in social welfare policymaking and a confidante of high-level federal social welfare administrators. Together, Polier and Wickenden helped educate Reich about …

The Place Of Law In Ivan Illich's Vision Of Social Transformation, Bruce K. Miller

Faculty Scholarship

This Article discusses Ivan Illich’s direction for social reform that led to his book, "Tools for Conviviality", where Illich targeted development, technology, and the exploitation of nature. Illich identified three key cultural institutions that needed to be reclaimed in order to bring about an inversion of industrial society: science, language, and law. This Article focuses on the rule of law and its central institutional invention—formal adjudication.

The Author suggests that Illich’s idealism can still be found in the law reform litigation effort and identifies the diminished stature of the ideal of disinterested adjudication as a significant threat to Illich’s hopes …

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

All Faculty Scholarship

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 …

Capitalism, Social Marginality, And The Rule Of Law's Uncertain Fate In Modern Society, Ahmed A. White

Publications

The rule of law is liberalism's key juridical aspiration. Yet its norms, centered on the principles of legality and legal generality, are being compromised all over the political and legal landscape. For decades, the dominant explanation of this worrying condition has focused mainly on the rise of the welfare state and its apparent incompatibility with the rule of law. But this approach, though shared by a politically diverse range of scholars, is outdated and misconceives the problem. A central function of the modem state has always been to prevent capitalism's inherent tendencies toward social marginalization from devolving into general social …

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 …

Victims' Rights, Rule Of Law, And The Threat To Liberal Jurisprudence, Ahmed A. White

Publications

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