Advocacy Strategies in Social Welfare Policy: Homelessness

I currently direct the homelessness unit at Greater Boston Legal Services after having been a welfare lawyer for fifteen years. When I first started teaching at Harvard about six years ago, I taught a course on Welfare Law. There is a value in teaching homelessness law as a discrete topic rather than lumping it under the traditional topics of welfare law or housing law. Initially, when I started teaching at Harvard, my goal was to impress the students with the fact that a poverty law subject like Welfare Law was as complicated doctrinally as anything else that they might learn. What I have come down to is focusing my goals into two main areas, values and role. Very few of my students are ever going to be legal services or public interest lawyers. My hope, however, is that all of them will in one way or another be contributing members of our society in ways that will have a substantial influence on the quality of our system. The most important thing I can do is expand their understanding of the nature of poverty and injustice in this society and the role the legal profession can play in resolving those problems

Housing the Homeless Through Expanding Access to Existing Housing Subsidies

The premise of this article is that homelessness in America today is essentially a product of the lack of affordable housing for very low-income people. The article outlines this central income/housing gap analysis as the factual predicate of the goal to alleviate homelessness through securing subsidized housing resources for the homeless and imminently homeless. It explains why, based on the nature and number of annually available housing subsidies, expanding access to existing housing subsidies is a valuable, workable, short-term, at least partial solution to the immediate crisis of lack of affordable housing, albeit one which does not negate the acknowledged necessity of increasing the supply of such subsidies. It suggests six strategies legal advocates may pursue to expand access for the homeless to the existing housing subsidy resources in their community. Finally, questions are raised about the value of this approach, in contrast to a focus solely on increasing the overall supply of income or housing subsidies, for which space permits only limited and tentative answers

Validation of a Molecular Sex Marker In Three Sturgeons From Eastern North America

Despite the importance of sex-specific information for sturgeon conservation and management, sex identification has been a major challenge outside of mature adults on spawning grounds. Recent work identified a sex-specific locus (AllWSex2) that appears to be broadly conserved across many Acipenserids, but the assay was not validated for all species within the family. We tested the AllWSex2 marker in three sturgeon taxa (shortnose sturgeon Acipenser brevirostrum, Gulf sturgeon A. oxyrhinchus desotoi, and Atlantic sturgeon A. oxyrhinchus oxyrhinchus) from the Atlantic and Gulf of Mexico Coasts of North America to validate its use for sex identification. Our results indicate AllWSex2 is conserved in all three taxa, presenting a new opportunity to derive sex-specific information from tissue samples, which are routinely collected from these taxa. We found high concordance (range: 97–100%) between genotypic and phenotypic/histological methods, suggesting the assay is broadly effective. However, the small amount of discordance between the methods (\u3c 3%) suggests further refinement may be possible