Poverty Law Policy And Practice

Poverty Law, Policy, and Practice is organized around an overview and history of federal policies, significant poverty law cases, and major government antipoverty programs—welfare, housing, health, legal aid, etc.--which map onto important theoretical, doctrinal, policy, and practice questions. The book includes academic debates about the nature and causes of poverty as well as various texts that help illuminate the struggles faced by poor people. Throughout, it contains reading selections highlighting different perspectives on whether poverty is primarily caused by individual actions, structural constraints, or a mix of both. Readers will come away from the book with both a sense of the legal and policy challenges that confront antipoverty efforts, and with an understanding of the trade-offs inherent in different government approaches to dealing with poverty. New to the Second Edition: Updated coverage of the Affordable Care Act (Obamacare) Updated coverage of criminalization of poverty and efforts to decriminalize poverty Additional content for every chapter, with an emphasis on new cases, data, and sources Professors and students will benefit from: Three beginning chapters of general background on poverty numbers (data), social welfare (policy) and constitutional law (doctrine), followed by substantive chapters that can be selected based on professor interest, which makes the book easy to use even for 2-credit classes Emerging topics at the intersection of criminal law and poverty, markets and poverty, and human rights and poverty, in addition to traditional poverty law topics An author team with a combined experience of more than 100 years of teaching and practicing poverty law Highlights throughout the text to the racial and gendered history and nature of poverty in America An emphasis on presenting the most important topics accessibly, with careful editing and selection of excerpts to make the most of student and professor time A mix in every chapter of theory, program details, advocacy strategies, and the experiences of poor people

Poverty Law: Policy and Practice is organized around an overview of federal policies, significant poverty law cases, and major government antipoverty programs--welfare, housing, health, etc.--which map onto important theoretical, doctrinal, policy, and practice questions. Features: As the first poverty law textbook to be published in 15 years, the edition includes new material, both changes in the law and updated scholarship that will make the book a great resource for teaching poverty law.

This law school casebook examines how society uses law to impact the realities of existence for poor people. It explores an emerging orthodoxy ; that government welfare programs harm more than they help. The first section focuses on conceptualizing poverty law theory through exploring current poverty, the historical legacies influencing welfare policy, and competing public policy perspectives on welfare. The second section examines poverty law practice, including challenges for poverty lawyers and the constitutional issues related to due process, equal protection, and the unconstitutional conditions dilemma. The third section discusses welfare reform and its focus on family and work.

Linking critical legal thinking to constitutional scholarship and a practical tradition of US lawyering that is orientated around anti-poverty activism, this book offers an original, revisionist account of contemporary jurisprudence, legal theory and legal activism. The book argues that we need to think in terms of a much broader inheritance for critical legal thinking that derives from the social ethics of the progressive era, new left understandings of "creative democracy" and radical theology. To this end, it puts jurisprudence and legal theory in touch with recent scholarship on the American left and, indeed, with attempts to recover the legacies of progressive era thinking, the civil rights struggle and the Great Society. Focusing on the theory and practice of poverty law in the period stretching from the mid-1960s to the present day, the book argues that at the heart of both critical and liberal thinking is an understanding of the lawyer as an ethical actor: inspired by faith or politics to appreciate the potential and limits of law in the struggle against economic inequality.

An overview of the role played by federalism in anti-poverty policy and in poverty law.

This book seeks to advance the emerging field of international poverty law. While law and development discourse has dealt with international poverty, advocates of poverty reduction customarily operate within a nation-state context. The contributors to this volume, while largely, although not exclusively, relying on human rights discourse and United Nations, International Labour Organization and World Trade Organization initiatives as their primary legal sources, begin to position international poverty law as a legitimate field for transnational, multidisciplinary legal research and dialogue. While critiquing both legal theory and current policy, they nevertheless open up a constructive prospect of specific arenas in which the development of international poverty law can contribute to addressing poverty reduction. The opening chapters of this volume provide a framework within which to position the future theoretical development of international poverty law. The rest of the book explores specific human rights initiatives that address particular aspects of poverty. These include an overview of human rights conventions and how they can be connected to international poverty law; measures required to counter the tendency of intellectual property law as applied to biological products and processes to undermine food security; the right to food as framed in United Nations development documents; the potential role that voluntary codes of conduct currently being adopted by some transnational corporations might play in poverty reduction; and the startlingly important development in the new South Africa of an alternative vision of constitutional law that takes account of international human rights instruments in moving towards rendering social and economic rights justifiable.

The welfare state is a pervasive and controversial aspect of contemporary society. Samuel Mencher provides a historical and philosophical background on the growth of welfare policy through its sources, concepts, and specific programs. He covers a period from the English Poor Law of the sixteenth century through contemporary times-viewing changing attitudes toward poverty, new concepts on the nature of man and the influence of scientific thought-and also discusses mercantilism, laissez-faire, utilitarianism, liberalism, socialism, romanticism, social Darwinism, and modern capitalism as major influences on the growth of economic security policy.