Social Welfare Law Commons^™

Table Of Contents, Seattle University Law Review

Seattle University Law Review

No abstract provided.

Federal Courts And The Poor: Lack Of Standards And Uniformity In Civil In Forma Pauperis Pleadings, Ezra Rosser

Scholarly Articles in Law Reviews & Journals

Andrew Hammond's article, Pleading Poverty in Federal Court, shows that there is considerable variation in how federal courts consider requests by the poor for fee waivers in civil litigation. Courts not only use different forms to collect ability-to-pay information but they also apply different standards when determining whether fees should be waived. By focusing attention on federal court in forma pauperis motion practices, Hammond's article sheds light on how the poor can be negatively impacted by routine court practices that might ordinarily be treated as merely administrative. Hammond makes a convincing argument that federal courts should have uniform standards for …

Nudges That Should Fail?, Avishalom Tor

Journal Articles

Professor Sunstein (2017) discusses possible causes for and policy implications of the failure of nudges, with a special attention to defaults. Though he focuses on nudges that fail when they should succeed, Sunstein recognizes that some failures reveal that a nudge should not have been attempted to begin with. Nudges that fail, however, does not consider fully the relationship between the outcomes of nudging and their likely welfare effects, most notably neglecting the troubling case of nudges that succeed when they should fail. Hence, after clarifying the boundaries of legitimate nudging and noting the fourfold relationship between the efficacy of …

Proposal For A Non-Subsidized, Non-Retirement-Plan, Employee-Owned Investment Vehicle To Replace The Esop, Sean M. Anderson, Andrew Stumpff Morrison

Law & Economics Working Papers

The authors have previously been critical of the existing American legal exemption and subsidy regime for employee stock ownership plans (“ESOPs”). By definition such plans create dangerously undiversified investment programs tying employees’ retirement security to the financial health of a single company – which, to compound the problem, is the employees’ employer, thereby correlating participants’ retirement security risk with the risk of losing their jobs. No demonstrated compensating policy benefit justifies this extraordinary large-scale departure from basic principles of financial prudence. One context, however, where a plausible case might be made for employee ownership is that which arises when a …

Localism, Labels, And Animal Welfare, Samuel R. Wiseman

Northwestern Journal of Law & Social Policy

The law does relatively little to improve the welfare of animals raised for food. In the short term, at least, market-based solutions appear to have more promise as a means of promoting farm animal welfare, as consumers increasingly seek out local and humanely-raised meat and eggs. To aid consumers in identifying these products, certification systems of varying degrees of rigor exist, but even these are of little use to consumers in the restaurant context, which accounts for a large percentage of meat consumption. Patrons see only finished meals, making fraud difficult to detect, and a recent newspaper investigation suggests that …

The Untold Story Of The Justice Gap: Integrating Poverty Law Into The Law School Curriculum, Vanita S. Snow

Pace Law Review

No abstract provided.

Workin’ 9:00–5:00 For Nine Months: Assessing Pregnancy Discrimination Laws In Georgia, Kaitlyn Pettet

Georgia State University Law Review

As demonstrated in this Note, there is still a considerable way to go before women are no longer forced to choose between pregnancy and keeping their career. Allegations of pregnancy discrimination in the workplace are also on the rise.

In 1997, 4,000 plaintiffs filed complaints with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC). By 2011, that number rose to 5,800. The EEOC won significant damages in pregnancy discrimination cases, demonstrating a greater tendency towards discrimination in the workplace. Additionally, this rise in claims and awards caught the attention of the nation’s media, placing new emphasis on the treatment of pregnant women …

Injustice Under Law: Perpetuating And Criminalizing Poverty Through The Courts, Judge Lisa Foster

Georgia State University Law Review

Money matters in the justice system. If you can afford to purchase your freedom pretrial, if you can afford to immediately pay fines and fees for minor traffic offenses and municipal code violations, if you can afford to hire an attorney, your experience of the justice system both procedurally and substantively will be qualitatively different than the experience of someone who is poor. More disturbingly, through a variety of policies and practices—some of them blatantly unconstitutional—our courts are perpetuating and criminalizing poverty. And when we talk about poverty in the United States, we are still talking about race, ethnicity, and …

Exploiting The Poor: Housing, Markets, And Vulnerability, Ezra Rosser

Scholarly Articles in Law Reviews & Journals

Matthew Desmond provocatively claims that landlords exploit poor tenants in his Pulitzer Prize winning book, Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City (2016). This essay celebrates Desmond's work and explores the exploitation claim, focusing on how landlords deliberately exploit vulnerable tenants and on forms of market-based exploitation.

Tackling The Social Determinants Of Health: A Central Role For Providers, Jessica Mantel

Georgia State University Law Review

Americans’ poor health and high health care costs largely stem from social, environmental, and behavioral factors that adversely impact health. Yet, health care providers traditionally have neglected the social determinants of health, focusing instead on medically treating patients’ symptoms. As a result, addressing the social determinants of health has primarily been the domain of government and community groups. Unfortunately, the efforts of the public health and social services sectors are stymied by chronic underfunding, a situation unlikely to change in the current political environment. This article identifies a potential solution to this problem: recent health care reforms that encourage health …

Murray Energy Corporation V. Mccarthy, Sarah M. Danno

Public Land & Resources Law Review

Holding that the widespread effects of environmental regulation on the coal industry constituted sufficient importance, the Northern District of West Virginia ordered the Environmental Protection Agency to conduct analysis on employment loss and plant reduction resulting from regulatory effects. In admonishing the EPA’s inaction, the court ruled that the Agency had a non-discretionary duty to evaluate employment and plant reduction. Furthermore, the court held that the EPA’s attempt to put forth general reports in place of required evaluations was an invalid attempt to circumvent its statutory duty.

Social Security Is Fair To All Generations: Demystifying The Trust Fund, Solvency, And The Promise To Younger Americans, Neil H. Buchanan

Cornell Journal of Law and Public Policy

The Social Security system has come under attack for having illegitimately transferred wealth from younger generations to the Baby Boom generation. This attack is unfounded, because it fails to understand how the system was altered in order to force the Baby Boomers to finance their own benefits in retirement. Any challenges that Social Security now faces are not caused by the pay-as-you-go structure of the system but by Baby Boomers' other policy errors, especially the emergence of extreme economic inequality since 1980. Attempting to fix the wrong problem all but guarantees a solution that will make matters worse. Generational justice …

Narrowly-Tailored Privatization, Brandon Weiss

Scholarly Articles in Law Reviews & Journals

Affordable housing projects in the United States have served as an integral part, and often the backbone, of broader community economic development (CED) initiatives for as long as community development corporations (CDCs) have existed. As the field of CED evolves, and critical thinking about the role of law and lawyers within it continues to develop, it is important that this thinking include a rigorous reevaluation of how affordable housing strategies can best support the broader aims of CED. Evidence from eighty years of significant federal policy intervention in affordable housing, fifty years of experimentation by CDCs, and thirty years of …

Putting Distribution First, Robert C. Hockett

Cornell Law Faculty Publications

It is common for normative legal theorists, economists and other policy analysts to conduct and communicate their work mainly in maximizing terms. They take the maximization of welfare, for example, or of wealth or utility, to be primary objectives of legislation and public policy. Few if any of these theorists seem to notice, however, that any time we speak explicitly of maximizing one thing, we speak implicitly of distributing other things and of equalizing yet other things. Fewer still seem to recognize that we effectively define ourselves by reference to that which we distribute and equalize. For it is in …

Cash Is King: How Market-Based Strategies Have Corrupted Classrooms And Criminal Courts In Post-Katrina New Orleans, Olympia Duhart, Hugh Mundy

Seattle University Law Review

On many accounts, it is a tale of two cities. The headlines and marketing machines tout to the world that “The Big Easy is Back.” But beyond the celebrations and parades, the story for poor Katrina survivors is very different. While many residents and businesses are enjoying a resurgence a decade after Katrina stormed through, others in post-Katrina New Orleans have a different experience. More than ten years after Hurricane Katrina, the city still struggles with systemic failures. These problem areas include housing, health care, mental health treatment, employment, education, and the criminal justice system. All of these challenges are …

Medicaid Maximization And Diversion: Illusory State Practices That Convert Federal Aid Into General State Revenue, Daniel L. Hatcher

Seattle University Law Review

For years, states have been using illusory schemes to maximize federal aid intended for Medicaid services—and then often diverting some or all of the resulting funds to other use. And states have help. Private revenue maximization consultants are hired by states to increase Medicaid claims, often for a contingency fee. We do not know the exact amount of federal Medicaid funds that has been diverted to state revenue and private profit each year, but it is in the billions. Part I of this Article sets out the structure of the Medicaid program and describes states’ use of revenue maximization contractors …

Complexity Analysis: A Preliminary Step Toward A General Systems Theory Of International Law, James L. Hildebrand

Georgia Journal of International & Comparative Law

No abstract provided.

Three Out Of Four Economists Recommend Raising The Minimum Wage! A Closer Look At The Debate Surrounding Seattle's Minimum Wage Ordinance, Erica Bergmann

Seattle University Law Review

This Note will discuss the implications of a high minimum wage by examining the debate around the Seattle Ordinance with a particular focus on the IFA lawsuit. To analyze the possible impacts of the Seattle Ordinance, current and historical arguments both in support of and in opposition to minimum wage laws are considered. This Note ultimately concludes that the U.S. District Court rightly denied the IFA’s motion for a preliminary injunction, which would have frustrated Seattle’s experiment before it began. Seattle’s plan to implement a $15 minimum wage, and similar experiments, should be permitted to proceed because the problem of …

Administrative Oversight Of State Medicaid Payment Policies:Giving Teeth To The Equal Access Provision, Julia Bienstock

Fordham Urban Law Journal

No abstract provided.

The Housing Crash And The End Of American Citizenship, Matt Stoller

Fordham Urban Law Journal

No abstract provided.

Overtaxing The Working Family: Uncle Sam And The Childcare Squeeze, Shannon Weeks Mccormack

Michigan Law Review

Today, many working parents are caught in a “childcare squeeze”: while they require two incomes just to make ends meet, they end up spending a strikingly large percentage of their income on childcare so that they can work outside the home. Worse still, some parents find themselves “squeezed out” of the market entirely, unable to earn the additional income their families require because they cannot find jobs that pay enough to offset soaring childcare expenses. This Article argues that the tax laws have played an important role in aggravating these hardships. Currently, the Internal Revenue Code treats the childcare costs …

Cash Is King: How Market-Based Strategies Have Corrupted Classrooms And Criminal Courts In Post-Katrina New Orleans, 39 Seattle U. L. Rev. 1199 (2016), Olympia Duhart, Hugh Mundy

UIC Law Open Access Faculty Scholarship

On many accounts, it is a tale of two cities. The headlines and marketing machines tout to the world that “The Big Easy is Back.” But beyond the celebrations and parades, the story for poor Katrina survivors is very different. While many residents and businesses are enjoying a resurgence a decade after Katrina stormed through, others in post-Katrina New Orleans have a different experience. More than ten years after Hurricane Katrina, the city still struggles with systemic failures. These problem areas include housing, health care, mental health treatment, employment, education, and the criminal justice system. All of these challenges are …

Reflections On Current Attempts To Revise International Legal Structures: The North-South Dialogue-Clash Of Values And Concepts, Contradictions And Compromises, Pedro Roffe

Georgia Journal of International & Comparative Law

No abstract provided.

Five Hundred Years Of English Poor Laws, 1349-1834: Regulating The Working And Nonworking Poor, William P. Quigley

Akron Law Review

This article will review how the working and the nonworking poor were regulated by 500 years of English poor laws. It will conclude with ideas about the principles which have since evolved to regulate the working and nonworking poor.

Antitrust, Competition Policy, An Inequality, Jonathan Baker, Steven Salop

Scholarly Articles in Law Reviews & Journals

Economic inequality recently has entered the political discourse in a highly visible way. This political impact is not a surprise. As the U.S. economy has begun to recover from the Great Recession since mid-2009, economic growth has effectively been appropriated by those already well off, leaving the median household less well off. The serious economic, political and moral issues raised by inequality can be addressed through a panoply of public policies including competition policy, the focus of this article. The article describes the channels through which market power contributes to inequality, and sets forth a range of possible antitrust policy …

Toward A Federal Constitutional Right To Employment, R. George Wright

Seattle University Law Review

This Article outlines an argument for a federal constitutional right to employment. The Article begins by examining the harms and costs of involuntary long-term unemployment. It then discusses the historical contributions to our understanding of the value of work, before drawing on several well-established jurisprudential distinctions to explain why, and to justify initial optimism regarding a constitutional employment right.

Can You Hear Me Now?: Making Participatory Governance Work For The Poor, Jaime Alison Lee

All Faculty Scholarship

Participatory governance engages people who are affected by a problem in the process of solving it. A participatory-governance approach to inner-city crime, for example, might include local residents in the process of designing a community-policing program. In recent decades, courts, legislatures, administrative agencies, and other institutions all have used participatory-governance approaches to tackle complex problems of law and public policy.

Some herald the potential for participatory-governance schemes to improve legal and policy outcomes, increase institutional accountability, empower marginalized groups, and further democratic ideals of self-determination and equality. Yet participatory-governance schemes can also promote the capture of public power by private …

The Independent Medicare Advisory Committee: Death Panel Or Smart Governing?, Robert Coleman

Journal of the National Association of Administrative Law Judiciary

No abstract provided.

Sharing The Risks And Rewards Of Economic Migration, Anu Bradford

Faculty Scholarship

International cooperation on economic migration has been difficult to achieve. The interests of emigration countries ("source countries") and immigration countries ("destination countries') seem impossible to align. These countries disagree on who should migrate: source countries resist migration that leads to a brain drain, while destination countries welcome these very migrants given that they are likely to be the most productive citizens and the least likely to become fiscal burdens on the destination country. In addition, destination countries resist migration that leads to domestic unemployment through labor replacement. As a result, international economic migration remains restricted at a substantial cost to …

Cornography: Perverse Incentives And The United States Corn Subsidy, Anthony Kammer

Journal of Food Law & Policy

Among the most important functions we have afforded to the U.S. Congress is the power to reshape social and economic incentive structures through legislation. Proceeding from the enumerated powers under the Constitution and using a complex toolbox of legislative and regulatory innovations, the federal legislature has enormous power to transform the types of behavior that people will perceive as self-interested throughout our economy and thus how those same people are likely to act. Congress can, among other things, create new forms of criminal and civil liability, establish entitlement systems, subsidize industries, encourage behavior through the tax code, regulate interactions among …