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.
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.
Thomas Alexander Aleinikoff is Director of the Zolberg Institute on Migration and Mobility at The New School in New York City. He was a law professor and dean at Georgetown University Law Center in Washington, D.C. He served, from 2010 to 2015, as the Deputy High Commissioner in the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees in Geneva, Switzerland. He was most recently a visiting professor of law and Huo Global Policy Initiative Research Fellow, Columbia Global Policy Initiative.
Some professionals and universities consider social policy a subset of public policy, while other practitioners characterize social policy and public policy to be two separate, competing approaches for the same public interest, with social policy deemed more holistic than public policy. Whichever of these persuasions a university adheres to, social policy begins with the study of the welfare state and social services. It consists of guidelines, principles, legislation and associated activities that affect the living conditions conducive to human welfare, such as a person's quality of life. The Department of Social Policy at the London School of Economics defines social policy as "an interdisciplinary and applied subject concerned with the analysis of societies' responses to social need", which seeks to foster in its students a capacity to understand theory and evidence drawn from a wide range of social science disciplines, including economics, sociology, psychology, geography, history, law, philosophy and political science. The Malcolm Wiener Center for Social Policy at Harvard University describes social policy as "public policy and practice in the areas of health care, human services, criminal justice, inequality, education, and labor". Social policy might also be described as actions that affect the well-being of members of a society through shaping the distribution of and access to goods and resources in that society. Social policy often deals with wicked problems.
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 simply referred to as 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.
In United States politics, modern liberalism, a form of social liberalism, is one of two current major political ideologies. It combines ideas of civil liberty and equality with support for social justice. Economically, modern liberalism supports government regulation on private industry, opposes corporate monopolies, and supports labor rights. Its fiscal policy opposes any reduction in spending on the social safety net, while simultaneously promoting income-proportional tax reform policies to reduce deficits. It calls for active government involvement in other social and economic matters such as: reducing economic inequality, increasing diversity, expanding access to education and healthcare, regulating economic activity, and environmentalism. Modern liberalism was formed in the 20th century in response to the Great Depression. Major examples of modern liberal policy programs include the New Deal, the Fair Deal, the New Frontier, the Great Society, the Affordable Care Act, and the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act.
Rosa Brooks is an American law professor, journalist, author and commentator on foreign policy, U.S. politics and criminal justice. She is the Scott K. Ginsburg Professor of Law and Policy at Georgetown University Law Center. Brooks is also an adjunct scholar at West Point's Modern War Institute and a senior fellow at the New America Foundation. From April 2009 to July 2011, Brooks was a counselor to Under Secretary of Defense for Policy Michèle Flournoy.
Liberalism in the United States is based on concepts of unalienable rights of the individual. The fundamental liberal ideals of freedom of speech, freedom of the press, freedom of religion, the separation of church and state, 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 U.S. parties are liberal and always have been. Essentially they espouse classical liberalism, that is a form of democratised Whig constitutionalism plus the free market. The point of difference comes with the influence of social liberalism and the proper role of government."
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.
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.
Harry Joseph Holzer is an American economist, educator and public policy analyst.
A cause lawyer, also known as a public interest lawyer or social lawyer, is a lawyer dedicated to the usage of law for the promotion of social change to address a cause. Cause lawyering is commonly described as a practice of "lawyering for the good" or using law to empower members of the weaker layers of society. It may or may not be performed pro bono. Cause lawyering is frequently practiced by individual lawyers or lawyers employed by associations that aim to supply a public service to complement state-provided legal aid.
Public interest law refers to legal practices undertaken to help poor, marginalized, or under-represented people, or to effect change in social policies in the public interest, on 'not for profit' terms, often in the fields of civil rights, civil liberties, religious liberty, human rights, women's rights, consumer rights, environmental protection, and so on.
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.
