Between the Lines: Interpreting Welfare Rights.

• Author: Mellor, William H., III

"WHAT WE OBJECT TO MOST is the undermining of the fundamental principle of national entitlement." So asserted the director of the Coalition of Human Needs when Congress last attempted to pass a welfare-reform measure. Despite such protests from welfare advocates, Congress passed the Family Support Act of 1988. Far from radical reform, its focus was job training and education.

The act did recognize that successful welfare reform was unlikely to come from the top down through the system. So it allowed states to experiment with different types of programs to see what worked best. New Jersey pioneered the state reforms by passing a comprehensive program in 1992. One provision of the New Jersey law provides that women who bear children while on welfare will no longer receive an increased welfare grant for each additional child.

The Legal Services Corporation, the National Organization for Women, and the American Civil Liberties Union charged into court. In carefully orchestrated litigation, those groups sought to enshrine the principle of national entitlement by establishing that the denial of increased welfare payments upon the birth of a child violates the mother's right to procreate.

This still-pending litigation is just the latest round in a 30-year campaign by welfare advocates to use the courts to expand the reach and scope of the welfare state. They have been abetted by Congress, which passes welfare laws prompting, indeed compelling, wide-ranging litigation. Courts have responded in fascinating and sometimes surprising ways. And although courts have thus far refused to recognize a constitutional right to welfare, they have played a central and evolving role in shaping the welfare system of today.

WEAVING COHERENT THEMES OUT OF THE many statutes and case law permutations requires a deft hand. Drawing from those themes real insights into the role of courts in policy making is an even more daunting task. R. Shep Melnick, chair of the politics department at Brandeis University, takes on this challenge in his new book, Between the Lines: Interpreting Welfare Rights.

Melnick offers the best analysis to date of how courts have addressed the issues surrounding welfare over the past 50 years, and he provides a penetrating appreciation of the courts' policy-making function. In keeping with the book's rigorous academic style, Melnick uses case studies to examine how courts interpreted sweeping, ambiguous, and at times contradictory statutes passed...