Jeon on Legal Aid Without Lawyers: How Boston's Nonlawyers Delivered and Shaped Justice for the Poor, 1879-1921 @PovertyLaw_Jrnl @kelppsea @StanfordLaw

Kelsea A. Jeon, Stanford Law School, has published Legal Aid Without Lawyers: How Boston’s Nonlawyers Delivered and Shaped Justice for the Poor, 1879–1921 at 29 Georgetown Journal on Poverty Law and Policy 122 (2022). Here is the abstract.

Women nonlawyers were some of the first actors to provide organized legal aid to America’s poor. Yet, today, unauthorized practice of law statutes bar nonlawyers from providing legal help, citing concerns about malpractice and public harm. This Article uses a historical case study to challenge conceptions that nonlawyers cannot provide effective legal services to the people. The study focuses on the development of legal aid in Boston via two organizations, the nonlawyer-led Women’s Educational and Industrial Union and the lawyer-centric Boston Legal Aid Society. Although organized legal aid in Boston began with the nonlawyers at the Union, they were eventually overtaken by the lawyer-centric Legal Aid Society. This paper examines this transition in legal aid practitioners, emphasizing how nonlawyers provided effective legal help. In doing so, it challenges the modern-day conception that access to justice requires access to an attorney and serves as a powerful counter to claims that nonlawyer practitioners endanger the public.

Download the article from the journal's website at the link.

Cutler on A Hebrew Republic in the Gilded Age? Henry George's Single Tax and the Hebrew Bible

Joshua Cutler, University of Houston College of Business, has published A Hebrew Republic in the Gilded Age? Henry George’s Single Tax and the Hebrew Bible. Here is the abstract.

Henry George sparked a vast popular movement following the publication of his classic work Progress and Poverty. Seeking to explain why poverty always seemed to increase along with progress, George proposed that, as societies advanced, land owners were able to capture an increasing share of wealth. To remedy this, George proposed a “Single Tax” on the unimproved value of land, which would prevent land speculation and hoarding and make land available for all who desired to work it. While George was ostensibly an economist, he is best understood as an ethical-religious figure, and his most devoted followers were a diverse array of religious leaders and reformers. However, the actual religious substance of George’s ideas has been largely unexplored. I propose that George’s program was inspired by Jewish ideas and institutions originating from the Hebrew Bible. In Hebraic thought, by virtue of creating the earth, God is the only rightful owner of land. This principle was embodied in the Hebrew Bible’s land laws that ordained an equal distribution of land along with institutions to maintain this distribution over time. Centuries before George, I discuss how medieval Jewish rabbis had already derived a taxing power from the Hebraic land laws. These biblical land laws would also come to have a strong influence on European political thought through an intellectual tradition known as the “Hebrew Republic.” I attempt to understand Henry George’s thought as an unwitting revival of this tradition, with his Single Tax as an innovative adaption of the Hebraic institutions. The Hebraic understanding of land ownership continues to offer potential inspiration for alternative systems of taxation and economic regulation.

Download the article from SSRN at the link.

Women In Support of Legal Aid, 1863-1945

Felice Batlan, Illinois Institute of Technology, Chicago-Kent College of Law, has published Introduction: Women and Justice for the Poor: A History of Legal Aid, 1863-1945, in Women and Justice for the Poor: A History of Legal Aid, 1863-1945 (F. Batlan, Cambridge University Press, 2015). Here is the abstract.

Challenging our assumptions about the history of the legal profession and the development of free legal aid, this book reveals that 19th-century women's organizations first offered legal assistance to poor women and that women lay lawyers provided such assistance. By the early 20th century, however, male lawyers founded their own legal aid societies, intentionally excluding women and narrowing the services provided. These different models of legal aid produced conflicting understandings of expertise, the rule of law, and the meaning of justice for the poor.

The full text is not available from SSRN.

Problems of Exclusion, the Occupy Montreal Movement and the Homeless

Veronique Fortin, University of California, Irvine, Department of Criminology, Law and Society, has published Occupation, Exclusion and the 'Homeless Problem' during Occupy Montreal as Oñati Socio-Legal Series, Vol. 5, No. 1, 2015. Here is the abstract.

English Abstract: As part of the Occupy movement in the fall of 2011, the Indignés in Montreal occupied a public square and set up an autonomous encampment to protest against socio-economic inequality. However, cohabitation problems soon arose in the camp and tensions between so-called homeless occupiers and Indignés occupiers developed, leading to the exclusion of the homeless people. This paper addresses this tension and inscribes the concept of occupation in a larger historical context. It teases out the legal histories of occupation-as-exclusive-appropriation to cast another light on occupation-as-protest.

Spanish Abstract: Como parte del movimiento “Ocupa” del otoño de 2011, los indignados de Montreal ocuparon una plaza pública, y levantaron un campamento autónomo para protestar por la desigualdad socio-económica. Sin embargo, en el campamento pronto se dieron problemas de cohabitación, y se produjeron tensiones entre los llamados ocupantes sin-techo y los ocupantes indignados, que llevaron a la exclusión de los primeros. Este artículo refleja esta tensión, y sitúa el concepto de ocupación en un contexto histórico mayor. Clarifica la historia legal de “ocupación como apropiación exclusiva” para dar una luz diferente a la “ocupación como protesta”.

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Engaging the Homeless Through New Media

Suzanne Bouclin, University of Ottawa Common Law Section, has published Homeless Nation: Producing Legal Subjectivities Through New Media as Ottawa Faculty of Law Working Paper No. 2015-10. Here is the abstract.

This book chapter describes “Homeless Nation” [HN], a Montreal-based non-profit organization dedicated to “democratizing technology” throughout Quebec and elsewhere in Canada. The overarching goal of Homeless Nation is to facilitate the street community’s ability to “tell their stories and have their voices heard” through written, audio, and video testimonials.

Its primary vehicle for doing so is a website that has been designed ‘for and by the street community’. In step with new user-friendly medial (file-sharing, portable cinematographic equipment, camera-ready phones, and new exposition venues such as YouTube), HN has, since 2003, provided access to interactive communication technologies (e-mail, blogging) and training in new media technologies (digital cameras, sound equipment, and editing software) to its members. The organization boasts more than six thousand users and one hundred guests (or “members”). Street-involved people who use the HN social media write poetry, post information about rallies, and suggest appropriate shelter or other survival strategies such as how to cash a check without identification and how to pass a driver’s test. Contributors provide “life updates” and also express political views such as critiquing cuts to social programs.

Download the paper from SSRN at the link.

What We Talk About When We Talk About Poverty: Racialized Metaphors and Anti-Poverty Programs

Ann Cammett, CUNY School of Law, has published Deadbeat Dads & Welfare Queens: How Metaphor Shapes Poverty Law at 34 Boston College Journal of Law and Social Justice 233 (2014). Here is the abstract.

Since the 1960s, racialized metaphors describing dysfunctional parents have been deployed by conservative policymakers to shape the way that the public views anti-poverty programs. The merging of race and welfare has eroded support for a robust social safety net, despite growing poverty and economic inequality throughout the land. This Article begins by describing the influence that metaphors have on the way people unconsciously perceive reality. It proceeds by examining historical racial tropes for Black families and how they were repurposed to create the Welfare Queen and Deadbeat Dad, the metaphorical villains of welfare programs. It also tracks the demise of welfare entitlements and the simultaneous ascendency of punitive child support enforcement intended to penalize both “absent” parents and families with non-normative structures. Ultimately, this Article argues that the focus on demonizing Black parents in the welfare system has created an obstacle to providing necessary resources to alleviate the suffering of a growing number of poor children of all races, the intended beneficiaries of public assistance.

Download the article from SSRN at the link. 

Looking At Looking Down

Yxta Maya Murray, Loyola Law School (Los Angeles), is publishing Peering in the Georgetown Journal on Poverty Law Policy. Here is the abstract.

“Peering” designates a legal practice of gazing at poor people. Legal actors literally peer, that is, look at the poor; they also peer in another fashion, which determines whether the visual subject is their peer. If the observed falls short of the observer’s social class, the law fixes them in their “proper place.” In the Fifth Amendment takings context, this means they are at risk for condemnation.

This article traces peering’s evolution in Fifth Amendment law. It notes peering’s initial descent: From the 1920s until the 2000s, courts looked “down” at the poor, often describing them as monstrous. “Slums” – edifices typically depicted as housing contagious subhumans – proved perfect objects of condemnations since they threatened the upper strata. In the 1980s, however, another legal gaze flourished: One that looked “up,” and whose bearers peered themselves with wealthy developers. In cases stemming from Michigan’s 1981 Poletown Neighborhood Council v. City of Detroit to the Supreme Court’s 2005 Kelo v. City of New London, we find rhetoric signaling legislative and judicial alignment with affluence. Here, lawmakers and judges approved condemnations that fostered “world class” and “cutting edge” corporate factories. I call this the ascendant or aspirational gaze, and in its exuberant optics, both the poor and the middle class find themselves vulnerable to “economic rejuvenation” takings. An active lobby of activists and judges challenge this gaze with petit bourgeois perspectives, leading to reform. But the poor submerge in these visuals, finding vanishing chances to escape “blight” condemnations.

To understand and combat peering, I study Columbia University’s recent expansion into West Harlem. I contemplate New York Court of Appeals’ 2010 Matter of Kaur v. New York State Urban Development Corporation, which approved of Manhattanville’s condemnation, and also the political rhetoric and blight reports that justified the taking. I additionally reference interviews with members of the Harlem community, and offer their home photographs as counter‐images to the ones that filled the blight reports. Inspired by the legal history I recount, as well as the testaments and images offered by Harlem residents, I describe the racist, classist, and violent meanings of blight findings. I reject “blight” as unsalvageable, but sketch a Fifth Amendment doctrine that would foster what one Harlem leader describes as a “decent life.”

Download the article from SSRN at the link.