A Systemic Reimagining of Poverty Law

A multitude of legal and administrative systems in America combine to regulate low-income people and to create and perpetuate poverty. Despite this, a literature review shows that poverty law scholarship has not analyzed how these systems interlock with each other and considered their cumulative effects on this population. The earliest poverty law scholarship, as exemplified by Stephen Wexler, was concerned with the practice of law on behalf of low-income individuals. The pioneers of the next wave of scholarship, such as Anthony Alfieri and Lucie White, incorporated postmodern theory into their work and applied it to the attorney-client relationship; however, their writing was still largely practice-based. Critiques of this scholarship were likewise concerned with its practice implications, and the next significant body of poverty law scholarship focused on where it should be situated within the academy. The movement which has come closest to this type of analysis is the ClassCrits, whose stated mission is to deconstruct laws in order to reveal the effects of economic and relational class on our legal systems. However, this school has opted not to focus on poverty in particular, and it has not made the leap to praxis. There is thus no body of work which reviews the cumulative effects of multiple laws on low-income individuals in order to inform and assist practice and policy as well as scholarship.