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 …

Concerns And Structural Barriers Associated With Wic Participation Among Wic-Eligible Women, Cindy H. Liu, Heidi H. Liu

All Faculty Scholarship

Objectives: To examine sociodemographic, psychosocial concerns, and structural barriers associated with women's participation in the USDA's Women, Infants, and Children (WIC) program among those eligible for the program.

Design and Sample: 1,634 White, African American, Hispanic, and Asian/Pacific Islander (A/Pl) women from the New York City area completed the Pregnancy Risk Assessment Monitoring System (PRAMS) from 2004-2007, a population-based survey.

Measurements: Data on WIC eligibility and participation, sociodemographic details, unintended pregnancy, social support, and structural barriers were evaluated.

Results: Hispanics and Blacks were 4.1 and 2.4 times more likely to participate, respectively, in the WIC program relative to Whites. Mothers …

Medicaid At 50: No Longer Limited To The "Deserving" Poor?, David Orentlicher

Scholarly Works

Professor David Orentlicher considers the significance of the passage of the Affordable Care Act on the Medicaid program. He discusses the expansion of the program's recipients from merely children, pregnant women, single caretakers of children, and disabled persons to all persons up to 138% of the federal poverty level. Professor Orentlicher argues that the Medicaid expansion reflects concerns about the high costs of health care rather than an evolution in societal thinking about the "deserving" poor. As a result, the expansion may not provide a stable source of health care coverage for the expansion population.

Public Assistance, Drug Testing, And The Law: The Limits Of Population-Based Legal Analysis, Candice T. Player

All Faculty Scholarship

In Populations, Public Health and the Law, legal scholar Wendy Parmet urges courts to embrace population-based legal analysis, a public health inspired approach to legal reasoning. Parmet contends that population-based legal analysis offers a way to analyze legal issues—not unlike law and economics—as well as a set of values from which to critique contemporary legal discourse. Population-based analysis has been warmly embraced by the health law community as a bold new way of analyzing legal issues. Still, population-based analysis is not without its problems. At times, Parmet claims too much territory for the population perspective. Moreover, Parmet urges courts …

Pledge Your Body For Your Bread: Welfare, Drug Testing, And The Inferior Fourth Amendment, Jordan C. Budd

Law Faculty Scholarship

Proposals to subject welfare recipients to periodic drug testing have emerged over the last three years as a significant legislative trend across the United States. Since 2007, over half of the states have considered bills requiring aid recipients to submit to invasive extraction procedures as an ongoing condition of public assistance. The vast majority of the legislation imposes testing without regard to suspected drug use, reflecting the implicit assumption that the poor are inherently predisposed to culpable conduct and thus may be subject to class-based intrusions that would be inarguably impermissible if inflicted on the less destitute. These proposals are …

A Fourth Amendment For The Poor Alone: Subconstitutional Status And The Myth Of The Inviolate Home, Jordan C. Budd

Law Faculty Scholarship

For much of our nation’s history, the poor have faced pervasive discrimination in the exercise of fundamental rights. Nowhere has the impairment been more severe than in the area of privacy. This Article considers the enduring legacy of this tradition with respect to the Fourth Amendment right to domestic privacy. Far from a matter of receding historical interest, the diminution of the poor’s right to privacy has accelerated in recent years and now represents a powerful theme within the jurisprudence of poverty. Triggering this development has been a series of challenges to aggressive administrative practices adopted by localities in the …

Making Work Pay: Promoting Employment And Better Child Support Outcomes For Low-Income And Incarcerated Parents, Ann Cammett

Scholarly Works

The New Jersey Institute for Social Justice prepared this report in response to concerns about child support debt—in particular as it creates a barrier to employment for low-income parents and works at cross-purposes with the goals of the child support program. Drawing on examples from other states, this report identifies a range of policies that inform child support practice in New Jersey and offers administrative, legislative, and programmatic solutions to address child support arrears owed by low-income and incarcerated parents.

Principles Of Non-Arbitrariness: Lawlessness In The Administration Of Welfare, Christine N. Cimini

Articles

This article explores whether there exists a concept of non-arbitrariness that imposes limitations on the administration of welfare benefits without rules, regulations, policies or procedures. To address this question, the article examines the concept of non-arbitrariness within various jurisprudential doctrines and the potential applicability of the concept to limit arbitrary governmental action in the welfare context. In each of the areas where courts regulate arbitrary governmental action, underlying judicial concerns give rise to jurisprudential principles. Four principles stand out. First, at a minimum, there must be a rational relationship between the government’s ends and the means it chooses to reach …

Three Generations Of Welfare Mothers Are Enough: A Disturbing Return To Eugenics In The Recent "Workfare" Law, Nicole Huberfeld

Law Faculty Scholarly Articles

In this Article, Nicole Huberfeld examines recent changes in the welfare system, and considers whether these changes are consistent with the stated goals of the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act of 1996. Turning to the history of “workfare,” Huberfeld reveals parallels between the reasoning of its proponents, and that of eugenicists. She argues that workfare mirrors eugenics theory because its proponents are imposing particular white, middleclass values upon the poor as a condition to providing them benefits: Through her comparison of workfare and eugenics, Huberfeld cautions against legislation that seeks to regulate the private conduct and personal decisions …

Welfare Reform And Child Care: A Proposal For State Legislation, Clare Huntington

Faculty Scholarship

Without subsidized child care, Dianne Williams, the mother of an eighteen-month-old son, would never have left welfare and earned the post-secondary degree that led to her current job as a senior secretary; Tammy Stinson, a U.S. Air Force veteran and 29-year-old mother of two children, would spend up to $150 of her weekly $200 salary on child care, increasing the likelihood she would turn to welfare or live in poverty; Jerry Andrews, a graduate of a government-funded early childhood education program, might not earn $31,200 a year and be working towards an engineering degree. These individuals are lucky. The vast …

Public Assurance Of An Adequate Minimum Income In Old Age: The Erratic Partnership Between Social Insurance And Public Assistance, Peter W. Martin

Cornell Law Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.