![handle is hein.journals/hlr83 and id is 43 raw text is: THE SUPREME COURT
1968 TERM
FoREwoRD: ON PROTECTING THE POOR THROUGH THE FOUR-
TEENTH AMENDMENT
Frank I. Michelman *
N the end, no doubt, a victorious War on Poverty will have
somehow attacked and conquered relative deprivation. In the
end, we may believe, the real problem will be found lurking in
people's responses to the disparity between the low access of
the poor to resources and the observable large control over re-
sources of the elite,1 or in the poor's felt lack of [the] op-
portunity viewed as being available to the major part of members
of society. 2 [I] n a hyperbolic way, it can respectably be said
that poverty is inequality, and that this, rather than hardship,
is the problem to be solved.'
No unflattering portrait of the human psyche - as beset with
envy and spite - is necessary to the belief that relative depriva-
tion can be a great evil, especially where the inequalities are
neither marginal in significance nor randomly distributed. One
need believe only that a socially assigned position of noticeably
inferior command over resources and influence is gravely pre-
judicial to one's chances for a decent life - that, as Lawrence
Haworth puts it,
One is poor not because he has no money, but because, pos-
sibly owing to lack of money, he lacks also access to the social
instrumentalities that make humanly significant action possible.
In part, it is a simple matter of not having the price of admis-
sion .... But in larger part it is a matter of not having the
character or competence (e.g. lack of verbal facility, lack of
motivation, destructive orientation) that establishes one's capa-
bility of taking up an opportunity that is formally open.4
*Professor of Law, Harvard Law School. B.A., Yale, i957; LL.B., Harvard,
196o.
This article was prepared, in part, in connection with research supported by The
Harvard Center on Law and Education with funds provided by The U.S. Office of
Economic Opportunity.
'Ornati, The Spatial Distribution of Urban Poverty, in POWER, POVERTY, AND
URBAN POLICY 49, 5o (W. Bloomberg & H. Schmandt eds. 1968).
' Goodpaster, An Introduction to the Community Development Corporation,
46 J. URBAN LAW 603, 625 (1969).
I1d. at 626.
'Haworth, Deprivation and the Good City, in POWER, POVERTY, AND URBAN
POLICY, supra note I, at 27, 39.](ViewImageLocal?handle=hein.journals/hlr83&div=15=&collection=&method=preview&ext=.png&size=3)
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