N.Y. Times Article: “For Medicare, Immigrants Offer Surplus, Study Finds”

New Article: Sabrina Tavernise, ”For Medicare, Immigrants Offer Surplus, Study Finds,” N.Y. Times, May 29, 2013.

New Working Paper Series from the Stanford Center on Poverty and Inequality

The Stanford Center on Poverty and Inequality has announced a new working paper series that is available on the Center’s website here.  The first three articles in the series from the website are below:

1. Michael Hout and Orestes P. Hastings, “Recession, Religion, and Happiness, 2006-2010.” Between 2006 and 2010, the percent of Americans who were “very happy” declined by four percentage points. Using new panel data from the General Social Survey, this paper examines the effects of divorce, job loss, and church attendance on happiness. Find out herewhich life events matter most.

2. Gary Solon, “Theoretical Models of Inequality Transmission across Multiple Generations.” Existing models of the transmission of socioeconomic status across generations consider only a limited number of avenues of transmission. This paper extends these models by building in new avenues. A must read!

3. Chris Wimer and Brooke Conroy Bass, “An Evaluation of Payday Plus San Francisco.” Is there a viable alternative to the high-interest payday loan? This paper evaluates a lower-interest alternative to payday loans, Payday Plus SF, which was recently rolled out in five local credit unions in San Francisco. Find outhere if it worked.

Issue Brief: “A State-by-State Snapshot of Poverty Among Seniors: Findings From Analysis of the Supplemental Poverty Measure”

Issue Brief: Zachary Levinson et al., A State-by-State Snapshot of Poverty Among Seniors: Findings From Analysis of the Supplemental Poverty Measure (Kaiser Family Foundation 2013).

-Thanks to Billie Jo Kaufman for the heads up!

AALS Poverty and Clinic Sections’ Call-for-Papers

CALL FOR PAPERS – AALS 2014 Joint Program of the Sections on Poverty Law and Clinical Legal Education

In honor of the 50^th Anniversary of the “War on Poverty,” the AALS sections on Poverty Law and Clinical Legal Education will sponsor a joint program at the AALS Annual Meeting, entitled 50 Years After the “War on Poverty:”  Evaluating Past Enactments and Innovative Approaches for Addressing Poverty in the 21^st Century.

The program will explore the effectiveness of the federal “War on Poverty” programs in addressing/eradicating poverty, and participants will discuss how amendments to those laws have had an impact on their effectiveness.  The “War on Poverty” programs include: Medicaid, Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (“TANF,” formerly Assistance for Families and Dependent Children), Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (“SNAP,” formerly known as food stamps), federally funded legal services (originally under the Office of Economic Opportunity, and now the Legal Services Corporation), Head Start, and the No Child Left Behind Act (originally the Elementary and Secondary Education Act), among others. In addition, the joint program will explore newer ways that the federal government has attempted to address poverty, such as the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, the Children’s Health Insurance Program, the Family and Medical Leave Act and others.

Among the questions to be considered are:  In what ways were individual “War on Poverty” programs effective and why?  How and why were those programs ineffective?  How did amendments to the War on Poverty enactments affect their efficacy in ameliorating poverty?  What impact have exclusions from the poverty programs on such grounds as immigration status had on poverty?  How do more recent federal laws affect poverty?  Do they work with or in opposition to prior federal laws?  Can the walls between federal poverty programs be broken down to more effectively address poverty? If so, how?   How have communities responded to the “War on Poverty” programs and what impact has their efforts had on reshaping the poverty programs?  What are concrete and innovative ways for the federal government to address poverty in the 21^st Century for both individuals and communities? In collaboration with the Boston College Journal on Law and Social Justice, the joint program seeks papers for presentation and publication relating to the program’s topic.  Submissions may include papers, on substantive law, interdisciplinary innovation or analysis, policy, empirical work, or clinical pedagogy, that either evaluate the effectiveness of the federal role in addressing poverty over the past 50 years, address how the federal government can address poverty in the 21^st Century, or both.

The Boston College Journal of Law and Social Justice will publish selected papers, no more than two of which will be selected for presentation at the joint program in New Orleans.  Selected authors must agree not to publish their work in another journal.  Not all papers selected for publication will be presented at the annual meeting. 

Submission information:  Papers should be submitted by email attachment to aals.waronpoverty.papers@gmail.com.  As the Planning Committee will use a blind review process, a cover letter with the author’s name and contact information should accompany the paper.  The paper itself, including the title page and footnotes must not contain any references identifying the author or the author’s school.  The submitting author is responsible for taking any steps necessary to redact self-identifying text or footnotes.  Near complete papers should be submitted by August 9, 2013.  Authors of papers chosen for presentation and/or publication will be notified by September 27, 2013.  Final papers are due by December 2013.

Eligibility: Full-time faculty members of AALS member law schools are eligible to submit papers. Foreign, visiting (without a full-time position at an AALS member law school), and adjunct faculty members; graduate students; fellows and non-law school faculty are not eligible to submit. Faculty at fee-paid non-member schools are also ineligible.

For more information, please contact Emily Suski, Planning Committee Co-Chair for the Poverty Law Section at esuski@gsu.eduor Hina Shah, Planning Committee Member for the Clinical Legal Education Section at hshah@ggu.edu.

New Article: “Sensibilities for Social Justice Lawyers”

New Article: Ascanio Piomelli, Sensibilities for Social Justice Lawyers, 10 Hastings Race & Poverty Law Journal 177 (2013).  Abstract below:

This essay suggests six mindsets or sensibilities that I consider crucial for 21st Century social justice lawyers of all ages: (1) We are not starting from scratch; we are building on the ideas and efforts of our predecessors and contemporaries. (2) It helps to be clear about our fundamental aims: what we mean by and count as social justice and social change. (3) We are at our best when we connect our efforts with others. (4) It is vital to cultivate our ability to see from multiple perspectives. (5) We are wise to pay close attention to class, race, and gender and to consciously combat all aspects of our cultural encapsulation. (6) Fostering social change is hard, fulfilling work.

Photojournalism: “The Ultimate Have-Nots in a Society of Have-Nots”

Photojournalism worth checking out: “The Ultimate Have-Nots in a Society of Have-Nots,” N.Y. Times, May 20, 2013.

Call for Papers: “Wills, Trusts and Estates Meets Gender, Race and Class”

From the Legal Scholarship Blog:

Call for Papers and Conference: “Wills, Trusts and Estates Meets Gender, Race and Class,” hosted by Oklahoma City University School of Law on Sept. 27-28, 2013.

This conference seeks to bring the insights of progressive property theory to the area of inheritance and succession law and will address the many points of intersection between inheritance law, gender and race, social structure, wealth inequality, domestic violence, indigenous people’s rights, among others.  Recognizing that inheritance law is a society’s DNA, the conference will present both theoretical, historical and practical approaches to ways it has and continues to maintain social structure and ways it can change it.

Call for Papers Deadline: August 1, 2013. Proposals should be 250 words long, sent to cspivack[@]okcu.edu.

New Article: “New Formalism in the Aftermath of the Housing Crisis”

New Article: Nestor Davidson, New Formalism in the Aftermath of the Housing Crisis, 93 B.U. L. Rev. 389 (2013).  Abstract below:

The housing crisis has left in its wake an ongoing legal crisis. After housing markets began to collapse across the country in 2007, foreclosures and housing-related bankruptcies surged significantly and have barely begun to abate more than six years later. As the legal system has confronted this aftermath, courts have increasingly accepted claims by borrowers that lenders and other entities involved in securitizing mortgages failed to follow requirements related to perfecting and transferring their security interests. These cases – which focus variously on issues such as standing, real party in interest, chains of assignment, the negotiability of mortgage notes, and the like – signal renewed formality in nearly every aspect of the resolution of mortgage distress. This new formalism in the aftermath of the housing crisis represents something of an ironic turn in the jurisprudence. From the earliest history of the mortgage, lenders have had a tendency to invoke the clear, sharp edges of law, while borrowers in distress have often resorted to equity for forbearance. The post-crisis caselaw thus upends the historical valence of lender-side formalism and borrower-side flexibility.

Building on this insight, this Article makes a normative and a theoretical claim. Normatively, while scholars have largely embraced the new formalism for the accountability it augurs, this consensus ignores the trend’s potential negative consequences. Lenders have greater resources than consumers to manage the technical aspects of mortgage distress litigation over the long run, and focusing on formal requirements may distract from responding to deeper substantive and structural questions that still remain largely unaddressed more than a half decade into the crisis. Equally telling, from a theoretical perspective, the new formalism sheds light on the perennial tension between law’s supposed certainty and equity’s flexibility. The emerging jurisprudence underscores the contingency of property and thus reinforces – again, ironically – pluralist conceptions of property even in the crucible of hard-edged formalism.

Editor’s Note: though some of the paper is more for property folks than pure poverty profs, it does a good job of summarizing borrower-side post-crisis litigation strategies used to defend against foreclosure.

University of Chicago Law Review Symposium on Immigration

University of Chicago Law Review Symposium on Immigration with some great articles available here.  (Vol. 80, Issue 1, 2013).

New Article: “The Passive Logic of Immigration Detention: Unraveling the Rationality of Imprisoning Immigrants Based on Markers of Race and Class Otherness”

New Article: César Cuauhtémoc García Hernández, The Passive Logic of Immigration Detention: Unraveling the Rationality of Imprisoning Immigrants Based on Markers of Race and Class Otherness, 1 Colum. J. Race & L. 353 (2013).  Abstract below:

In an effort to explain the massive growth of immigration imprisonment, this Essay explores the use of race and class as tools for policing immigration law.  The Essay does this by contemplating the effect of an immigration law scheme that, at its most fundamental, requires sorting desirable immigrants from undesirable immigrants, and that, in recent years, has accomplished this sorting through increased reliance on criminal records.  Placing these two features of contemporary immigration law within the context of two decades-old forms of indisputably racialized policing—mass incarceration of black and brown people for criminal law violations and the Supreme Court’s sanctioning of racial profiling in immigration law policing—the Essay concludes that it was inevitable for penal imprisonment trends to taint immigration law enforcement with raced and classed mass incarceration.