POVL-300 : Poverty Law

This course aims to create a critical dialogue about the role of law in addressing issues affecting the most impoverished members of our community with a special emphasis on housing, homelessness and racial disparities in access to opportunity and criminal justice. The interdisciplinary course materials that we will be using throughout the semester have been selected to help students engage in critical analysis about the roles government, politics, non-profit policies and the legal community play in perpetuating poverty, and also in constructively addressing it. The course will explore: -specific questions and histories concerning housing, homelessness, policing and imprisonment, public benefits, disaster relief, immigration, and other legal issues facing low-income populations; -how societal, governmental, and justice system responses to inequality have resulted in the "siloing" of both problems as well as responses to them, resulting in "blindness" to intersecting forms of bias and oppression that compounds unfairness and suffering; -how we might conceptualize different ways the law and justice system can ally itself with community-based social movements and governance frameworks aimed at redistributing wealth and life chances instead of perpetuating the unfairness and oppressive conditions perpetuated by the status quo. No prerequisites.