Kornbluh & Tani, "Siting the Legal History of Poverty," a.k.a. Even MORE on the Blackwell Companion to American History

Last week we ran a few posts on the new Blackwell Companion to American Legal History. When this volume was in its early stages, the editors contacted Felicia Kornbluh (University of Vermont) about writing a chapter on the history of law and poverty. Felicia was kind enough to invite me to co-author. We had some real revelations as we attempted to chart the historiography of this sub-field. For one, we began to question the wisdom of characterizing law and poverty scholarship as a discrete body of work, when in fact it exists at the intersections of numerous other historical fields and closely related disciplines (e.g. the welfare state scholarship in political science and sociology). We found ourselves searching for a way of organizing the material that would emphasize these connections. In the process of canvassing the writing on this topic, we also began thinking bigger and questioning the prevailing methods for investigating legal change over time. In this chapter we sketch the outlines of a new and emerging method, visible in recent law and poverty scholarship and elsewhere: the method is based on the idea that actors "below, above, and amidst" are potential shapers of law and legal meaning; historians who embrace this method look to formal law and politics, the legal claims-making of the non-elite, and lots of stuff in between.

Here are the first four paragraphs of our Chapter, titled "Siting the Legal History of Poverty: Below, Above, and Amidst":

Where does “the legal history of poverty” begin and end? Virtually all law may be seen as the law of poverty. Property law is, in its unstated obverse, the law of poverty; the law of marriage is, among other things, the law of property distribution and mutual obligation between husband and wife; tax laws may impoverish the taxpayer or, by collecting paltry revenues, may prevent the state from remediating others’ distress. Even when poor and working-class people have enjoyed access to lawyers and legal processes, law has helped generate, preserve, and legitimize inequalities of wealth. Some colleagues faced with this challenge have focused on public benefits law (Nice and Trubek, 1997). While we place much law outside of our framework, we widen our frame beyond public benefits or poverty law as traditionally understood.

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