New Article: Scott L. Cummings & Jeffrey Selbin, Poverty Law, International Encyclopedia of Social & Behavioral Sciences, 2d Ed., Forthcoming. Abstract below:
“Poverty law” refers to policy and lawyering strategies to contest inequality. The rise of the federal welfare state shaped the contours of poverty law in the first half of the twentieth century. This combined with the rights revolution at mid-century to mobilize legal services lawyers and courts in the War on Poverty, which was the zenith of the antipoverty movement. The welfare state’s subsequent decline and federal court retrenchment channeled the antipoverty movement in new directions forged by decentralization, privatization, and globalization: moving it downward (from federal to local), outward (from state to market), and beyond (from domestic to global).
Poverty Law 