Courses

This class covers a range of issues related to poverty law, access to justice, and policy. To start, we will address how poverty is measured and the characteristics of urban versus rural poverty, the relationship between poverty and racial discrimination, and then move from there to domestic policies toward poverty, including federal and state benefits and restrictions on their availability. Digging deeper, we will focus on the impact of poverty on law and policy in two subject matter areas, family law and housing. From there, we’ll turn to the role of lawyers in planning, achieving, and implementing reforms, and particularly the techniques, strategies, challenges, and struggles in ensuring that people living in poverty have access to the advocacy they need to navigate complex legal and regulatory systems, culminating in a detailed proposal for an access to justice pilot project based on state and local needs.This will be an interactive and community-engaged course, interweaving how the concepts we study in the classroom are felt in the poor and marginalized communities in Charlottesville and Albemarle County and surrounding area.