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 …