The war on poverty is the unofficial name for legislation first introduced by United States President Lyndon B. Johnson during his State of the Union Address on January 8, 1964. This legislation was proposed by Johnson in response to a national poverty rate of around nineteen percent. The speech led the United States Congress to pass the Economic Opportunity Act, which established the Office of Economic Opportunity (OEO) to administer the local application of federal funds targeted against poverty. The forty programs established by the Act were collectively aimed at eliminating poverty by improving living conditions for residents of low-income neighborhoods and by helping the poor access economic opportunities long denied from them.
Critical legal studies (CLS) is a school of critical theory that developed in the United States during the 1970s. CLS adherents claim that laws are devised to maintain the status quo of society and thereby codify its biases against marginalized groups.
Marian Wright Edelman is an American activist for civil rights and children's rights. She is the founder and president emerita of the Children's Defense Fund. She influenced leaders such as Martin Luther King Jr, and Hillary Clinton.
Thomas Alexander Aleinikoff is executive dean of The New School for Social Research and University Professor at The New School in New York City. He was previously director of the Zolberg Institute on Migration and Mobility at The New School and a law professor and dean at Georgetown University Law Center in Washington, D.C. From 2010 to 2015, Aleinikoff was the Deputy High Commissioner in the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees in Geneva, Switzerland. In 2016, he was a visiting professor of law at the Columbia Law School and Huo Global Policy Initiative Research Fellow at the Columbia Global Policy Initiative.
Reva B. Siegel is the Nicholas deB. Katzenbach Professor of Law at Yale Law School. Siegel's writing draws on legal history to explore questions of law and inequality, and to analyze how courts interact with representative government and popular movements in interpreting the Constitution. She is currently writing on the role of social movement conflict in guiding constitutional change, addressing this question in recent articles on reproductive rights, originalism and the Second Amendment, the "de facto ERA," and the enforcement of Brown. Her publications include Processes of Constitutional Decisionmaking ; The Constitution in 2020 ; and Directions in Sexual Harassment Law. Professor Siegel received her B.A., M.Phil, and J.D. from Yale University, clerked for Judge Spottswood William Robinson III on the D.C. Circuit, and began teaching at the University of California at Berkeley. She is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and is active in the American Society for Legal History, the Association of American Law Schools, the American Constitution Society, in the national organization and as faculty advisor of Yale's chapter. She was elected to the American Philosophical Society in 2018.
Workfare is a governmental plan under which welfare recipients are required to accept public-service jobs or to participate in job training. Many countries around the world have adopted workfare to reduce poverty among able-bodied adults; however, their approaches to execution vary. The United States and United Kingdom are two countries utilizing workfare, albeit with different backgrounds.
Temporary Assistance for Needy Families is a federal assistance program of the United States. It began on July 1, 1997, and succeeded the Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC) program, providing cash assistance to indigent American families through the United States Department of Health and Human Services. TANF is often regarded as just "welfare", but some argue this is a misnomer. Unlike AFDC, which provided a guaranteed cash benefit to eligible families, TANF is a block grant to states that creates no federal entitlement to welfare and is used by states to provide non-welfare services, including educational services, to employed people.
The Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act of 1996 (PRWORA) is a United States federal law passed by the 104th United States Congress and signed into law by President Bill Clinton. The bill implemented major changes to U.S. social welfare policy, replacing the Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC) program with the Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) program.
Mari J. Matsuda is an American lawyer, activist, and law professor at the William S. Richardson School of Law at the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa. She was the first tenured female Asian American law professor in the United States, at University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) School of Law in 1998 and one of the leading voices in critical race theory since its inception. Matsuda returned to Richardson in the fall of 2008. Prior to her return, Matsuda was a professor at the UCLA School of Law and Georgetown University Law Center, specializing in the fields of torts, constitutional law, legal history, feminist theory, critical race theory, and civil rights law.
Modern liberalism, often referred to simply as liberalism, is the dominant version of liberalism in the United States. It combines ideas of civil liberty and equality with support for social justice and a mixed economy.
Liberalism in the United States is based on concepts of unalienable rights of the individual. The fundamental liberal ideals of consent of the governed, freedom of speech, freedom of the press, freedom of religion, the separation of church and state, the right to bear arms, the right to due process, and equality before the law are widely accepted as a common foundation of liberalism. It differs from liberalism worldwide because the United States has never had a resident hereditary aristocracy, and avoided much of the class warfare that characterized Europe. According to American philosopher Ian Adams, "all US parties are liberal and always have been. Essentially they espouse classical liberalism, that is a form of democratized Whig constitutionalism plus the free market. The point of difference comes with the influence of social liberalism" and principled disagreements about the proper role of government.
Shapiro v. Thompson, 394 U.S. 618 (1969), was a landmark decision of the Supreme Court of the United States that invalidated state durational residency requirements for public assistance and helped establish a fundamental "right to travel" in U.S. law. Shapiro was a part of a set of three welfare cases all heard during the 1968–69 term by the Supreme Court, alongside Harrell v. Tobriner and Smith v. Reynolds. Additionally, Shapiro, King v. Smith (1968), and Goldberg v. Kelly (1970) comprise the "Welfare Cases", a set of successful Supreme Court cases that dealt with welfare.
Stephen Wizner is the William O. Douglas Clinical Professor of Law at Yale Law School. He also has a Special Appointment as the Sackler Professor of Law at Tel Aviv University.
John Augustine Ryan (1869–1945) was an American Catholic priest who was a noted moral theologian and advocate of social justice. Ryan lived during a decisive moment in the development of Catholic social teaching within the United States. The largest influx of immigrants in America's history, the emancipation of American slaves, and the Industrial Revolution had produced a new social climate in the early twentieth century, and the Catholic Church faced increasing pressure to take a stance on questions of social reform.
The Tulane Law Review, a publication of the Tulane University Law School, was founded in 1916, and is currently published five times annually. The Law Review has an international circulation, and is one of few American law reviews carried by law libraries in the United Kingdom.
Robert F. Kennedy Human Rights is an American 501(c)(3) nonprofit human rights advocacy organization. It was named after United States Senator Robert F. Kennedy in 1968, a few months after his assassination. The organization of leading attorneys, advocates, entrepreneurs and writers is dedicated to a more just and peaceful world, working alongside local activists to ensure lasting positive change in governments and corporations. It also promotes human rights advocacy through its RFK Human Rights Award, and supports investigative journalists and authors through the RFK Book and Journalism Awards. It is based in New York and Washington, D.C. Robert F. Kennedy's daughter, Kerry Kennedy, serves as the organization's President.
Harry Joseph Holzer is an American economist, educator and public policy analyst.
Mary Kerry Kennedy is an American lawyer, author, and human rights activist. She is a daughter of former United States Senator Robert F. Kennedy and Ethel Kennedy, and a niece of former U.S. President John F. Kennedy and former U.S. Senator Ted Kennedy.
United States Senators Joseph S. Clark and Robert F. Kennedy toured the Mississippi Delta on April 10, 1967. At the behest of civil rights lawyer Marian Wright, Clark and Kennedy, together with two other senators, traveled to Mississippi to investigate reports of extreme poverty and starvation. Following a field hearing, they drove from Greenville to Clarksdale, stopping and touring impoverished communities as they went. Deeply disturbed by what they saw, the senators returned to Washington, D.C., and began pushing for a series of reforms to alleviate the situation. Extensive media coverage of the event exposed the American public to real instances of malnutrition and starvation. The country was shocked and hunger became an important topic nationwide as people began looking for solutions. Efforts by the government and political action groups ultimately resulted in the problem being largely reduced by the 1970s.
Linda McClain is the Robert B. Kent Professor of Law at Boston University School of Law, and was previously the Rivkin Radler Distinguished Professor of Law at Hofstra Law School. McClain's work focuses on family law, sex equality, and feminist legal theory. McClain has written extensively on topics related to family, gender, and constitutional issues.
