Social Welfare Law Commons^™

Poverty & Period Products: Achieving Menstrual And Abortion Justice Through Public Benefit Programs, Allyson Crays

American University Journal of Gender, Social Policy & the Law

Low-income people need and deserve access to quality menstrual products through public benefit programs as a public health and reproductive justice issue. Whether someone is managing their monthly period, a medical abortion, or post-pregnancy discharge, menstrual products are essential to ensure that person’s safety and bodily

autonomy. Low-income people on public benefit programs who menstruate face a variety of stigmas and barriers, and these programs are in a unique position to increase access to menstrual products to work toward menstrual and abortion justice. This Article outlines the history of public benefit programs and the stigmas accompanying them. It also details …

Mailing It In: Due Process Requires Technology-Driven Safeguards In Public Benefits, Eric Lukoff

Celebrating WCL Student Authors

Due process in safety net public benefit programs requires agencies to employ modern technology in providing notice that is reasonably likely to reach participants. The Supreme Court has held that due process is dependent on the time, place, and circumstances in which it operates. Scholars have further argued that due process is adaptable to changing facts and circumstances over time. Yet, mailed paper notices remain the standard in providing notice to participants in public benefit programs.

Living in poverty today looks significantly different than it did nearly fifty years ago at the time of Mathews v. Eldridge, where the Court …

Municipal Abortion Bans: When Local Control Clashes With State Power, Laura D. Hermer

American University Journal of Gender, Social Policy & the Law

Anti-abortion activists are using different strategies in different states. Some focus on restricting zoning for abortion clinics. Others address the licensure of abortion providers. Some purport to create a cause of action for private individuals to sue neighbors and others in their municipality who get an abortion. Still, others seek to enforce the federal Comstock Act, alleging that it prohibits the mailing of abortifacients and preempts state abortion law to the contrary.

This Article evaluates the likely success of each of these strategies in two states in which they are currently being tried: Nebraska and New Mexico. Part I will …

A Critical Jeffersonian Mind For A Community Reinvestment Bind, Chaz Brooks

Scholarly Articles in Law Reviews & Journals

The Community Reinvestment Act of 1977 ("CRA") primarily sought to remedy decades of government sanctioned disinvestment in so-called “redlined communities.” Through the Home Owners’ Loan Corporation and later the Federal Housing Administration, the United States of America created from whole cloth a structure that encouraged and subsidized the explosion of homeownership in white American households. Following decades of racialized wealth generation, the United States had a change of heart. Congress determined that financiers needed a gentle push to invest fairly. Additionally, Congress wanted one thing clear in the drafting of this remedy—it must not allocate credit.

This essay considers how …

The Road To Brackeen: Defending Icwa 2013-2023, Kathryn Fort

American University Law Review

From 2013 to 2023, the Indian Child Welfare Act (ICWA) was challenged in the courts more than the Affordable Care Act. This Article lays out the history of the fight over ICWA from Baby Girl to Haaland, from my perspective as a clinical professor who has been involved with every major ICWA case since 2013, as well as my observations about why ICWA was so vulnerable to an organized litigation attack despite continued bipartisan and widespread support of the law.

Opportunity Zones, 1031 Exchanges, And Universal Housing Vouchers, Brandon Weiss

Scholarly Articles in Law Reviews & Journals

The Tax Cuts and Jobs Act of 2017 contained former President Trump's signature economic development initiative: the Opportunity Zone program. Allowing a deferral of capital gains tax for certain qualifying investments in low-income areas, the Opportunity Zone program aims to spur economic development by steering capital into economically distressed neighborhoods. The program is the latest iteration of an overly simplistic market-based approach to community development an approach that transcends political party-based on a flawed yet enduring notion that mere proximity of capital will solve deeply entrenched issues of poverty and racial inequality. In reality, the legacy of Opportunity Zones is …

Poor Gabriel: How Ambiguous State Immunity Policies For Child Protection Agency Workers Fail Children Of Color, Samiksha Manjani

American University Journal of Gender, Social Policy & the Law

No abstract provided.

Court Personalities And Impoverished Parents, Ezra Rosser

Scholarly Articles in Law Reviews & Journals

Professor Tonya Brito's in-depth examination of the pursuit of child support from poor fathers continues to pay significant dividends that extend well beyond family law. Producing Justice in Poor People's Courts: Four Models of State Legal Actors highlights the that differing personalities and approaches can have on impoverished parents involved in child-support-enforcement disputes before the courts. Based on an impressive ethnographic study, Brito's article shows how the actors involved craft stories about impoverished family dynamics as a way to make sense of their own role and complicity in an often unjust system of regulating poor families.

White Parents Searching For White Public Schools, Ezra Rosser

Scholarly Articles in Law Reviews & Journals

The New White Flight makes two significant contributions to our understanding of race and education. First, it argues that white parents chose to send their children to segregated, disproportionately white schools. This choice is reflected in white residential preferences for areas where "pricing-out mechanisms" ensure that the local school is disproportionately white. (P. 254.) This racially-motivated choice holds "even when school quality is controlled for, meaning that whites tend to choose predominately white schools even when presented with the choice of a more integrated school that is of good academic quality." (P. 236.) Second, it shows how charter schools give …

Shelter Mobility, And The Voucher Program, Ezra Rosser

Scholarly Articles in Law Reviews & Journals

What is to be done about the poor and about poor neighborhoods? When it comes to housing policy, the current hope is that the Housing Choice Voucher Program (formerly the Section 8 Voucher Program) can provide an or ambitiously the answer to this perennial societal question. By piggybacking on the private rental market, the voucher program supposedly has numerous advantages over traditional, project-based, public housing. Not only is it less costly to house poor people in privately owned units compared to the cost of constructing and maintaining public housing, but the voucher program also offers the possibility of deconcentrating the …

Race, Space And Democracy: Locally-Based Strategies For Development - Panel Discussion From Fourth National People Of Color Legal Scholarship Conference, Hosted At The American University Washington College Of Law, Ezra Rosser, Audrey Mcfarlane, Erika Wilson, Michele Alexander

Scholarly Articles in Law Reviews & Journals

Panel Discussion from Fourth National People of Color Legal Scholarship Conference, Hosted at the American University Washington College of Law:

[Audrey McFarlane] Alright, good morning everyone, thank you for joining us. This is the race, space, and democracy panel, locally based strategies for

development. Right now we have with us, me. I'm Audrey McFarlane. I'm a professor at the University of Baltimore. We also have Erika Wilson, who is a professor at the University of North Carolina. I'm going to dispense with the long bios, and commend you to the program guide for the long bios. Suffice it to say, …

Introduction, Ezra Rosser

Contributions to Books

This is the introduction to Holes in the Safety Net: Federalism and Poverty (Ezra Rosser ed., Cambridge University Press, 2019). The table of contents for the book, with links to the other chapters, can be found below: Introduction (this document) Ezra Rosser Part I: Welfare and Federalism Ch. 1 Federalism, Entitlement, and Punishment across the US Social Welfare State Wendy Bach Ch. 2 Laboratories of Suffering: Toward Democratic Welfare Governance Monica Bell, Andrea Taverna, Dhruv Aggarwal, and Isra Syed Ch. 3 The Difference in Being Poor in Red States versus Blue States Michele Gilman Part II: States, Federalism, and Antipoverty …

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 …

Interdisciplinary Projects-Based Community Entrepreneurship Courses, Brandon Weiss, Anthony J. Luppino

Scholarly Articles in Law Reviews & Journals

Over the last approximately fifteen years, the University of Missouri Kansas City (UMKC) School of Law has developed a multifaceted set of courses, including interdisciplinary courses, pro bono clinics, and other programs and events relating to for-profit entrepreneurship and economic development, and social and civic entrepreneurship. This presentation will describe two recent interdisciplinary additions to these offerings-- the Law, Technology and Public Policy (LT&PP) course and the Entrepreneurial Urban Development (EUD) course. Both have strong elements of increased access to law and justice, with particular focus on presently disadvantaged and underrepresented individuals, groups, and communities. They significantly enhance the training …

Eitc For All: A Universal Basic Income Compromise Proposal, Benjamin Leff

Scholarly Articles in Law Reviews & Journals

Universal Basic Income ("UBI") is a concept that has recently begun to enter the popular political consciousness in the United States. It is defined as "a regular cash income paid to all, on an individual basis, without means test or work requirement." It is invoked for a wide variety of political and social purposes, but is almost always presented as radically different from existing governmental welfare and transfer systems. Once a UBI is disaggregated into discrete policy components, it is possible to imagine to what degree existing programs share the benefits (and detriments) of a UBI to a greater or …

Medicaid For All?: State-Level Single-Payer Health Care, Lindsay Wiley

Scholarly Articles in Law Reviews & Journals

If single-payer health care is ever to become a reality in the United States, it will very likely be pioneered by a state government, much like Canada’s single-payer system was first adopted in the provinces. Canada’s system operates more like U.S. Medicaid — financed nationally but administered largely by the provinces — than U.S. Medicare. This article describes three basic strategies progressive U.S. state governments are exploring for achieving universal access to high-quality health care and better health outcomes for their residents. First, maximizing eligibility for the existing Medicaid program using matching federal funds. Second, taking up the mantle of …

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.

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 …

Food Stamps, Unjust Enrichment And Minimum Wage, Candace Kovacic-Fleischer

Scholarly Articles in Law Reviews & Journals

A number of large retail chains with monopsony power, such as Walmart, pay their low level employees so little that these employees are eligible for food stamps and other governmental benefits. In addition to paying low wages, these chains often have hourly restrictions so that their employees are not eligible for overtime pay. At times the chains violate the wage and hour provisions of the Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA) by making hourly employees work “off the clock,” a practice known as wage theft.

One of the reasons these low wage retailers can pay so little is because their employees …

Health Justice: A Framework (And Calll To Action) For The Elimination Of Health Inequity And Social Injustice, Emily A. Benfer

American University Law Review

No abstract provided.

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 …

A Government Success Story: How Data Analysis By The Social Security Appeals Council (With A Push From The Administrative Conference Of The United States) Is Transforming Social Security Disability Adjudication, Jeffrey Lubbers, Gerald K. Ray

Scholarly Articles in Law Reviews & Journals

This Article for the special issue on the Administrative Conference of the United States ("ACUS") focuses on how a collaboration between ACUS and the Social Security Administration ("SSA") has helped SSA use data analysis to bring about significant improvements in the quality and consistency of disability case review. SSA's efforts to closely analyze numerous data points in the disability adjudication process (encouraged by ACUS recommendations) have produced information that has led to breakthroughs in how training is provided and feedback is given to Administrative Law Judges and other key staff, which has in turn led to improved productivity and accuracy …

Destabilizing Property, Ezra Rosser

Scholarly Articles in Law Reviews & Journals

Property theory has entered into uncertain times. Conservative and progressive scholars are, it seems, fiercely contesting everything, from what is at the core of property to what obligations owners owe society. Fundamentally, the debate is about whether property law works. Conservatives believe that property law works. Progressives believe property law could and should work, though it needs to be made more inclusive. While there have been numerous responses to the conservative emphasis on exclusion, this Article begins by addressing a related line of argument, the recent attacks information theorists have made on the bundle of rights conception of property. This …

Should Congress Create A Special Category Of Ssa Aljs, Jeffrey Lubbers

Scholarly Articles in Law Reviews & Journals

No abstract provided.

Reclaiming Demographics: Women, Poverty, And The Common Interest In Particular Struggles, Ezra Rosser

Scholarly Articles in Law Reviews & Journals

Invited Symposium Introduction for Jan. 2012 AALS Poverty Section Panel.

The Politics Of Equal Justice, Robert A. Hornstein, Daniel G. Atkins, Treena A. Kaye

American University Journal of Gender, Social Policy & the Law

No abstract provided.

Welfare Reform In Mississippi: Tanf Policy And Its Implications, Pearson Lidell Jr., Steve Watson, William D. Eshee Jr.

American University Journal of Gender, Social Policy & the Law

No abstract provided.

Referenda And The District Of Columbia's Human Rights Act: Voting On Same-Sex Marriage In The Nation's Capital, Jacob Stewart

Legislation and Policy Brief

Beginning with Massachusetts in 2003, the courts and legislatures of many states have had to decide whether same-sex marriage is or should be a fundamental right under their respective constitutions.  Although only five states and the District of Columbia legally perform same-sex marriages, a few other jurisdictions are in the process of proposing laws moving in that direction.  However, the vast majority of states are holding fast to the traditional heterosexual definition of marriage.  Thirty-eight states have adopted some sort of Defense of Marriage Act, constitutional amendment, or similar measure that defines marriage as the union between one man and …

Behind The Wedding Veil: Child Marriage As A Form Of Trafficking In Girls, Elizabeth Warner

American University Journal of Gender, Social Policy & the Law

No abstract provided.

Getting To Know The Poor, Ezra Rosser

Scholarly Articles in Law Reviews & Journals

No abstract provided.