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Full-Text Articles in Law
Disability, Universalism, Social Rights, And Citizenship, Samuel R. Bagenstos
Disability, Universalism, Social Rights, And Citizenship, Samuel R. Bagenstos
Articles
The 2016 election has had significant consequences for American social welfare policy. Some of these consequences are direct. By giving unified control of the federal government to the Republican Party for the first time in a decade, the election has potentially empowered conservatives to ram through a bill to repeal the Affordable Care Act—the landmark “Obamacare” law that marked the most significant expansion of the social welfare state since the 1960s. Other consequences are more indirect. Both the election result itself, and Republicans’ actions since, have spurred a renewed debate within the left-liberal coalition regarding the politics of social welfare …
Fighting Fines & Fees: Borrowing From Consumer Law To Combat Criminal Justice Debt Abuses, Neil L. Sobol
Fighting Fines & Fees: Borrowing From Consumer Law To Combat Criminal Justice Debt Abuses, Neil L. Sobol
Faculty Scholarship
Although media and academic sources often describe mass incarceration as the primary challenge facing the American criminal justice system, the imposition of criminal justice debt may be a more pervasive problem. On March 14, 2016, the Department of Justice (DOJ) requested that state chief justices forward a letter to all judges in their jurisdictions describing the constitutional violations associated with the illegal assessment and enforcement of fines and fees. The DOJ’s concerns include the incarceration of indigent individuals without determining whether the failure to pay is willful and the use of bail practices that result in impoverished defendants remaining in …
Poor Support/Rich Support: (Re)Viewing The American Social Welfare State, Wendy A. Bach
Poor Support/Rich Support: (Re)Viewing The American Social Welfare State, Wendy A. Bach
Scholarly Works
Since at least the 1970s a variety of scholars have redefined the U.S. social welfare state to include not only traditional benefit programs (for example Food Stamps and social security) but also a variety of tax benefits that are “hidden” or “submerged” forms of “welfare for the wealthy.” Including these benefits in the overall picture of U.S. social welfare provision reveals a system that is both larger in size than popularly believed and that, in addition to providing some support for the poor, distributes significant benefits regressively, to households with substantial wealth. Although a variety of scholars and policy analysts …