In honor of the 50th 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 21st 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 asthe 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 21st 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 21st 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.
