Poverty Law 101: The Law and History of the U.S. Welfare State

Poverty law will remain marginalized so long as we confine it to a population that we and our students understand as marginal. Tani discusses Professor Wax’s characterization of the “old welfare law framework,” as well as her account of what happened to it, and would not advocate a return to a court-centered, advocacy-oriented approach

An Administrative Right To Be Free from Sexual Violence? Title IX Enforcement in Historical and Institutional Perspective

One of the most controversial administrative actions in recent years is the U.S. Department of Education’s campaign against sexual assault on college campuses. Using its authority under Title IX of the Education Amendments of 1972 (mandating nondiscrimination on the basis of sex in all educational programs and activities receiving federal funds), the Department’s Office for Civil Rights (OCR) has launched an enforcement effort that critics denounce as aggressive, manipulative, and corrosive of individual liberties. Missing from the commentary is a historically informed understanding of why this administrative campaign unfolded as it did. This Article offers crucial context by reminding readers that freedom from sexual violence was once celebrated as a national civil right—upon the enactment of the Violence Against Women Act of 1994—but then lost that status in a 5–4 decision by the U.S. Supreme Court. OCR’s recent campaign reflects a legal and political landscape in which at least some potential victims of sexual violence had come to feel rightfully connected to the institutions of the federal government, and then became righteously outraged by the endurance of such violence in their communities. OCR’s campaign also reflects the unique role of federal administrative agencies in this landscape. Thanks to the power of the purse and the conditions that Congress has attached to funding streams, agencies enjoy a powerful form of jurisdiction over particular spaces and institutions. Attempts to harness this jurisdiction in service of aspirational rights claims should not surprise us; indeed, we should expect such efforts to continue. Building on this insight, the Article concludes with a research agenda for other scholars seeking to understand and evaluate OCR’s handiwork

Dynamic property studies of Sterling engines

A description is given of the results of dynamic property tests that were carried out using a trial produced prototype of a 50 KW Sterling engine. The features of the engine are shown graphically. A high thermal efficiency is found in the low rotation region

Project MKULTRA and the Search for Mind Control: Clandestine Use of LSD Within the CIA

From 1953 to 1964 the CIA engaged in various clandestine operations to manipulate the human mind. With the relatively new discovery of LSD, scientists around the world became interested in its ability to be used for both defensive and offensive measures in the interest of national security. Minimal documentation was kept on the extent of the research conducted on the manipulation of the human mind. The Intelligence agents, physicians, researchers, and other involved in the MKULTRA experiments were in direct violation of ethical codes previously set in place prior to the program, including the Hippocratic Oath, U.S. Constitution, Nuremberg Code, and the United Nations Declaration of Human Rights

Compensation, Commodification, and Disablement: How Law Has Dehumanized Laboring Bodies and Excluded Nonlaboring Humans

A Review of Injury Impoverished: Workplace Accidents, Capitalism, and Law in the Progressive Era. by Nate Holdren

Administrative Equal Protection: Federalism, the Fourteenth Amendment, and the Rights of the Poor

This Article intervenes in a burgeoning literature on “administrative constitutionalism,” the phenomenon of federal agencies — rather than courts — assuming significant responsibility for elaborating the meaning of the U.S. Constitution. Drawing on original historical research, I document and analyze what I call “administrative equal protection”: interpretations of the Fourteenth Amendment’s Equal Protection Clause in a key federal agency at a time when the Clause’s meaning was fiercely contested. These interpretations are particularly important because of their interplay with cooperative federalism — specifically, with states’ ability to exercise their traditional police power after accepting federal money. The Article’s argument is based on a story of change over time. In the late 1930s, when federal courts appeared reluctant to vindicate equal protection claims, the federal Social Security Board (later to become part of the Department of Health, Education and Welfare) took a more active role via its administration of federal grants for state-run public welfare programs. Through the 1940s and 1950s, agency lawyers developed and applied a nondeferential rationality model of equal protection to assess state welfare rules. When paired with the agency’s control over generous federal subsidies, this interpretation had tangible consequences: administrators challenged some of the era’s most restrictive state welfare laws and, in the process, spread the notion that poor Americans had constitutional rights, including under the Fourteenth Amendment. In the mid 1960s, as the agency became embroiled in battles over school desegregation, administrators deftly recharacterized their constitutional interpretation as a statutory one. They saw their constitutional arguments take on new life, however, as welfare rights advocates (including former agency personnel) wielded them in court. Both developments are visible in the landmark case King v. Smith (1968). There the Supreme Court affirmed the poor claimants’ victory in the court below, but rejected the lower court’s equal protection holding in favor of one grounded in the agency’s novel statutory interpretation. Administrative equal protection thus continued to operate as a meaningful constraint on state action — and in fact helped remake the administration of American poor relief in the late twentieth century — but remained hidden from view. In addition to giving content and direction to the study of administrative constitutionalism, this history enriches legal scholarship in three ways: (1) it provides context for the “new federalism” revolution of the last decades of the twentieth century; (2) it opens up new questions about today’s “uncooperative federalism”; and (3) it helps explain the penurious protections that today’s equal protection jurisprudence offers the poor

Administrative Equal Protection: Federalism, the Fourteenth Amendment, and the Rights of the Poor

This Article intervenes in a burgeoning literature on “administrative constitutionalism,” the phenomenon of federal agencies — rather than courts — assuming significant responsibility for elaborating the meaning of the U.S. Constitution. Drawing on original historical research, I document and analyze what I call “administrative equal protection”: interpretations of the Fourteenth Amendment’s Equal Protection Clause in a key federal agency at a time when the Clause’s meaning was fiercely contested. These interpretations are particularly important because of their interplay with cooperative federalism — specifically, with states’ ability to exercise their traditional police power after accepting federal money. The Article’s argument is based on a story of change over time. In the late 1930s, when federal courts appeared reluctant to vindicate equal protection claims, the federal Social Security Board (later to become part of the Department of Health, Education and Welfare) took a more active role via its administration of federal grants for state-run public welfare programs. Through the 1940s and 1950s, agency lawyers developed and applied a nondeferential rationality model of equal protection to assess state welfare rules. When paired with the agency’s control over generous federal subsidies, this interpretation had tangible consequences: administrators challenged some of the era’s most restrictive state welfare laws and, in the process, spread the notion that poor Americans had constitutional rights, including under the Fourteenth Amendment. In the mid 1960s, as the agency became embroiled in battles over school desegregation, administrators deftly recharacterized their constitutional interpretation as a statutory one. They saw their constitutional arguments take on new life, however, as welfare rights advocates (including former agency personnel) wielded them in court. Both developments are visible in the landmark case King v. Smith (1968). There the Supreme Court affirmed the poor claimants’ victory in the court below, but rejected the lower court’s equal protection holding in favor of one grounded in the agency’s novel statutory interpretation. Administrative equal protection thus continued to operate as a meaningful constraint on state action — and in fact helped remake the administration of American poor relief in the late twentieth century — but remained hidden from view. In addition to giving content and direction to the study of administrative constitutionalism, this history enriches legal scholarship in three ways: (1) it provides context for the “new federalism” revolution of the last decades of the twentieth century; (2) it opens up new questions about today’s “uncooperative federalism”; and (3) it helps explain the penurious protections that today’s equal protection jurisprudence offers the poor

Administrative Constitutionalism at the Borders of Belonging : Drawing on History to Expand the Archive and Change the Lens

Research on administrative constitutionalism has generally come out of law schools, from scholars specializing in public law. A limitation of the existing scholarship is its relatively thin empirical foundation. Administrative constitutionalism is hard to see because much of what administrators do is hard to see, and because the significance of some administrative interpretations only becomes apparent over time. This Article expands the archive, by alerting legal scholars to fine-grained historical research on Americans’ encounters with administrative agencies. This body of work—coming largely out of history departments—is particularly attentive to the experiences of marginalized and non-elite populations. And although the historians writing in this vein have not always emphasized the constitutional aspects of their stories, those aspects are there between the lines. By analyzing two examples—the Freedmen’s Bureau’s interpretation of the Thirteenth Amendment and immigration officials’ interpretation of the Fifth Amendment due process guarantee—this Article demonstrates what historians have to offer the study of administrative constitutionalism, both empirically and normatively. American history, this research reminds us, is about competing constitutional visions. Administrators helped pick winners and losers in an ongoing battle for formal legitimacy