Course Overview

Welcome to Poverty Law, Fall 2020

This course aims to create a critical dialogue about the role of law in structuring wealth inequality and its potential role in remedying such inequality. The interdisciplinary course materials that we will be using throughout the semester have been selected to assist students in engaging in critical analysis about the roles of settler colonialism, capitalism, white supremacy, patriarchy and ableism in structuring law and poverty, as well as law’s role in structuring those systems of meaning, control and distribution. The course will explore both specific questions and histories concerning public benefits, disaster relief, housing, imprisonment, immigration and other legal issues facing low-income populations as well as broad questions about how we might conceptualize governance and the role of law reform in social movements aimed at redistributing wealth and life chances.

Please note that there will be scheduled meetings on Zoom for this course. Please see the Zoom Meetings page for more information.