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Full-Text Articles in Law
Something For Nothing: Liberal Justice And Welfare Work Requirements, Amy L. Wax
Something For Nothing: Liberal Justice And Welfare Work Requirements, Amy L. Wax
All Faculty Scholarship
Welfare reform legislation enacted in 1996, which created the Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) program, makes entitlement to federal poor relief conditional on fulfilling work requirements. The article addresses the following timely question: whether just liberal societies should require work as a condition of public assistance for the able-bodied, or whether aid should be provided unconditionally through, for example, a basic guaranteed income for all. Drawing on the work of liberal egalitarian theorists, the article investigates whether standard liberal theories of justice can help make sense of arguments commonly voiced in favor of work requirements: that unconditional welfare guarantees, …
Redistributing Optimally: Of Tax Rules, Legal Rules, And Insurance, Kyle D. Logue, Ronen Avraham
Redistributing Optimally: Of Tax Rules, Legal Rules, And Insurance, Kyle D. Logue, Ronen Avraham
Articles
From the beginning of the law and economics movement, normative legal economists have focused almost exclusively on evaluating the efficiency of alternative legal rules. The distributional consequences of legal rules, therefore, have largely been ignored. It is tempting to conclude that legal economists are hostile or indifferent to concerns of distributional fairness. In fact, however, the discipline of economics has a great deal to say about distributional policy. The normative branch of economics, known as welfare economics, has always been deeply concerned with distributional issues. It is not that welfare economists purport to know a priori the "right" or "optimal" …