Welfare Law

• Author: Vicki Lens
• Pages: 244-257

The Handbook of Law and Society, First Edition. Edited by Austin Sarat and Patricia Ewick.

© 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. Published 2015 by John Wiley & Sons, Inc.

Introduction

How much to provide, and how to provide it, are the salient questions in welfare

law. What to give has deviated little; welfare is the least generous of social assistance

programs. How to provide assistance, however, has changed over time. Since the

advent of the modern welfare state, three different welfare regimes have predomi-

nated: the social work model, a rights‐based legal model, and a neoliberal model.

Virtually all have failed the poor, welfare policy being one of exclusion, rather than

inclusion, stigmatizing those who seek aid and seeking to deter them from asking

for assistance.

The modern welfare bureaucracy, established in 1935 in the United States with

the passage of the Aid to Dependent Children program (ADC), was based on the

social work model. It was animated by the belief that helping the poor was as much

about providing social work services as it was about financial aid. Caseworkers were

given wide discretion in tailoring grants to individual needs. In the 1960s this model

came under attack, by both liberals and conservatives. Liberals argued that poor

people needed money, not social work. Discretion also had a downside: what a

family got could depend on a caseworker’s own biases and prejudices rather than

need. Conservatives had similar concerns, although they feared that caseworkers

would give too much, rather than too little.

The result was the replacement of the social work model with the legal model,

which relied on a set of rules that applied equally to all. The contagion of the civil

rights movement of the 1960s also reached the welfare office, with welfare framed

as an entitlement or right, protected by the Due Process Clause of the US

Constitution. Poverty was framed as an institutional rather than an individual

Welfare Law

Vicki Lens

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