Law Commons^™

A Theory Of Poverty: Legal Immobility, Sara Sternberg Greene

Faculty Scholarship

The puzzle of why the cycle of poverty persists and upward class mobility is so difficult for the poor has long captivated scholars and the public alike. Yet with all of the attention that has been paid to poverty, the crucial role of the law, particularly state and local law, in perpetuating poverty is largely ignored. This Article offers a new theory of poverty, one that introduces the concept of legal immobility. Legal immobility considers the cumulative effects of state and local laws as a mechanism through which poverty is perpetuated and upward mobility is stunted. The Article provides an …

A Different Class Of Care: The Benefits Crisis And Low-Wage Workers, Trina Jones

Faculty Scholarship

When compared to other developed nations, the United States fares poorly with regard to benefits for workers. While the situation is grim for most U.S. workers, it is worse for low-wage workers. Data show a significant benefits gap between low-wage and high-wage in terms of flexible work arrangements (FWAs), paid leave, pensions, and employer-sponsored health-care insurance, among other things. This gap exists notwithstanding the fact that FWAs and employment benefits produce positive returns for employees, employers, and society in general. Despite these returns, this Article contends that employers will be loath to extend FWAs and greater employment benefits to low-wage …

Feminism And Economic Inequality, Katharine T. Bartlett

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Changing The Tax Code To Create Consumer-Driven Health Insurance Competition, Regina Herzlinger, Barak D. Richman

Faculty Scholarship

Because current tax laws exclude employer-paid health insurance premiums from employees’ taxable wages and income, employer-sponsored insurance remains the primary source of health insurance for most employed Americans. Economists have long blamed the employer-based insurance tax exclusion for inflating health care costs, and, more recently, for constraining income growth and exacerbating income inequality.

We execute a simulation to test the effect of permitting employees to receive their employers’ premium contribution directly and then purchase health insurance themselves, using tax-free funds. Employees could deduct for income tax purposes the amount used for insurance and, if they spend less than the amount …

Inequality Rediscovered, Jedediah Purdy, David Singh Grewal

Faculty Scholarship

Widespread recognition that economic inequality has been growing for forty years in most of the developed world, and in fact has tended to grow across most of the history of modern economies, shows that the period 1945-1973, when inequality of wealth and income shrank, was a marked anomaly in historical experience. At the time, however, the anomalous period of equality seemed to vindicate a long history of optimism about economic life: that growth would overcome meaningful scarcity and usher in an egalitarian and humanistic period that could almost qualify as post-economic. This has not been the experience of the last …

Equity By The Numbers: Measuring Poverty, Inequality, And Injustice, Matthew D. Adler

Faculty Scholarship

Can we measure inequity? Can we arrive at a number or numbers capturing the extent to which a given society is equitable or inequitable? Sometimes such questions are answered with a “no”: equity is a qualitative, non-numerical consideration.

This Article offers a different perspective. The difficulty with equity measurement is not the impossibility of quantification, but the overabundance of possible metrics. There currently exist at least four families of equity-measurement frameworks, used by scholars and, to some extent, governments: inequality metrics (such as the Gini coefficient), poverty metrics, social-gradient metrics (such as the concentration index), and equity-regarding social welfare functions. …

Wealth And Democracy, Jedediah Purdy

Faculty Scholarship

The renewed debate over inequality has highlighted a set of deficits in much of the last fifty-plus years of thinking on the topic. The late twentieth-century tradition of thinking about distributive justice largely assumed (1) that market dynamics would produce stable and tolerable levels of inequality; and (2) that a relatively powerful, competent, and legitimate state could effectively redistribute to mitigate what inequality did arise. What was largely overlooked in this thought and has since risen to central attention is the prospect that (1) accelerating levels of market-produced inequality will (2) undermine the legitimacy and efficacy of the state and …

The Pigou-Dalton Principle And The Structure Of Distributive Justice, Matthew D. Adler

Faculty Scholarship

The Pigou-Dalton (PD) principle recommends a non-leaky, non-rank-switching transfer of goods from someone with more goods to someone with less. This Article defends the PD principle as an aspect of distributive justice --- enabling the comparison of two distributions, neither completely equal, as more or less just. It shows how the PD principle flows from a particular view, adumbrated by Thomas Nagel, about the grounding of distributive justice in individuals' "claims." And it criticizes two competing frameworks for thinking about justice that less clearly support the principle: the veil-of-ignorance framework, and Larry Temkin's proposal that fairer distributions are those concerning …

Occupying America: Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., The American Dream, And The Challenge Of Socio-Economic Inequality, Trina Jones

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Income Distribution Dynamics With Endogenous Fertility, Daniel L. Chen, Michael Kremer

Faculty Scholarship

Developing countries with highly unequal income distributions, such as Brazil or South Africa, face an uphill battle in reducing inequality. Educated workers in these countries have a much lower birth rate than uneducated workers. Assuming children of educated workers are more likely to become educated, this fertility differential increaases the proportion of unskilled workers, reducing their wages, and thus their opportunity cost of having children, creating a vicious cycle. A model incorporating this effect generates multiple stedy-state levels of inequality, suggesting that in some circumstances, temporarily increasing access to educational opportunities could permanently reduce inequality. Empirical evidence suggests that the …

Non-Economic Objectives And The Efficiency Properties Of Trade, Jagdish N. Bhagwati

Faculty Scholarship

It is well known (Kemp, 1962; Samuelson, 1962; Bhagwati, forthcoming) that, for a country with no monopoly power in trade (or domestic distortions), free trade (in the sense of a policy resulting in the equalization of domestic and foreign prices and hence excluding trade, production and consumption taxes, subsidies, and quantitative restrictions) is the optimal policy. It follows, therefore, that free trade is superior to no trade.

It has also been argued recently (Kemp, 1962), that, even in the case where there is monopoly power in trade, so that both no trade and free trade are suboptimal policies, it is …