Law Commons^™

Poverty, Dignity, And Public Housing, Jaime Alison Lee

All Faculty Scholarship

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 …

The Return Of The Welfare Queen, Michele E. Gilman

All Faculty Scholarship

After welfare reform was passed in 1996, there was every reason to hope that the welfare queen was dead. The “welfare queen” was shorthand for a lazy woman of color, with numerous children she cannot support, who is cheating taxpayers by abusing the system to collect government assistance. For years, this long-standing racist and gendered stereotype was used to attack the poor and the cash assistance programs that support them. In 1996, TANF capped welfare receipt to five years and required work as a condition of eligibility, thus stripping the welfare queen of her throne of dependency. Nevertheless, during the …

Feminism, Democracy, And The "War On Women", Michele E. Gilman

All Faculty Scholarship

This article analyzes the social conservative attacks on women preceding the 2012 election cycle, known as the War on Women, and the ensuing feminist response. Combat was waged on many fronts, including abortion restrictions, access to contraception, funding for Planned Parenthood, welfare programs, and workplace fairness. The article discusses what this "war" means for the complex relationship between feminism and democracy. American democracy has had both liberating and oppressive effects for women, while feminism has sometimes struggled internally to appropriate the values of democracy and externally to harness its potential. Accordingly, the article explains the major political theories regarding feminism …

Forgotten Fathers, Daniel L. Hatcher

All Faculty Scholarship

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 Class Differential In Privacy Law, Michele E. Gilman

All Faculty Scholarship

This article analyzes how privacy law fails the poor. Due to advanced technologies, all Americans are facing corporate and governmental surveillance. However, privacy law is focused on middle-class concerns about limiting the disclosure of personal data so that it is not misused. By contrast, along the welfare-to-work continuum, poor people face privacy intrusions at the time that the state or their employers gather data. This data collection tends to be stigmatizing and humiliating, and it thus not only compounds the harmful effects of living in poverty, but also dampens democratic participation by the poor. The poor interact with the government …

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

All Faculty Scholarship

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 …

Collateral Children: Consequence And Illegality At The Intersection Of Foster Care And Child Support, Daniel L. Hatcher

All Faculty Scholarship

This Article is the third in a series addressing the conflict between state revenue maximization strategies and the missions of state agencies serving low-income children. The Article examines the policy of foster care cost recovery through child support enforcement. When children are removed from poor families and placed in foster care, federal law requires child welfare agencies to initiate child support obligations against the parents. Resulting payments do not benefit the children but are converted into a government funding stream to reimburse the costs of foster care. This cost recovery effort often subordinates the child welfare system’s primary goals of …

Fighting Poverty With Faith: Reflections On Ten Years Of Charitable Choice, Michele E. Gilman

All Faculty Scholarship

Since 1996, the federal government has undertaken major initiatives to fund religious organizations to deliver social services. These programs, called charitable choice, continue to expand and now account for over $2 billion in social welfare spending. However, charitable choice blurs the lines between church and state and is thus highly controversial. This article reflects on ten years of experience with charitable choice and assesses the impact and effectiveness of these programs. There is little empirical evidence that faith-based social services are superior to secular programs. Moreover, religious grantees, and congregations in particular, are often unable to manage large federal grants …

Child Support Harming Children: Subordinating The Best Interests Of Children To The Fiscal Interests Of The State, Daniel L. Hatcher

All Faculty Scholarship

This Article examines the government policy of seeking reimbursement of welfare costs through child support enforcement. Under our welfare program, Temporary Aid to Needy Families (TANF), custodial parents applying for benefits are required to establish child support obligations against the absent parents and to assign the resulting child support payments to the government. As a result, half of the $105 billion in national child support debt is owed to the government rather than to children. The government's fiscal interests are in direct conflict with the best interests of the children - the controlling legal standard in child support matters. The …

Foster Children Paying For Foster Care, Daniel L. Hatcher

All Faculty Scholarship

This Article examines the legality and policy concerns of state foster care agencies using children's Social Security benefits as a state funding stream. The practice requires foster children who are disabled or have deceased or disabled parents to pay for their own care. Often with the assistance of private consultants under contingency fee contracts, agencies look for children who are eligible for Social Security benefits and interject themselves as the children's representative payees. Rather than using the benefits to serve the children's unmet needs, the agencies use their fiduciary power to access the children's benefits and apply the funds to …

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 …

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

All Faculty Scholarship

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 Accountability In An Era Of Privatized Welfare, Michele E. Gilman

All Faculty Scholarship

When the federal welfare system was reformed in 1996, Congress devolved much of the authority over welfare delivery to the states and gave them the option of contracting out administration of their programs to private entities. Moreover, after welfare reform, enacted as the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act (PRA), welfare recipients are expected to work to receive benefits. This means that front-line workers must engage in intensive interpersonal counseling rather than simply confirm objective eligibility criteria and dispense checks. As a result, front-line workers have vastly increased discretion. When privatization is layered over this discretionary scheme, issues of …

'M' Is For The Many Things That 'Mother' Means Family Life Has Changed, But Family Law Hasn't Kept Pace, Jane C. Murphy

All Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.