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93 Mich. L. Rev. 1401 (1994-1995)
Poverty Lawyering in the Golden Age

handle is hein.journals/mlr93 and id is 1423 raw text is: POVERTY LAWYERING IN THE GOLDEN AGE Matthew Diller* BRUTAL NEED: LAWYERS AND THE WELFARE RIGHTS MoVE- MENT, 1960-1973. By Martha F. Davis. New Haven: Yale Univer- sity Press. 1993. Pp. ix, 187. $26.50. The 1960s was a decade of extremes. The decade opened with an almost-unbounded sense of optimism about America. With the nation led by a charismatic young President, it seemed that all problems and challenges could be solved if given sufficient atten- tion. The United States, it was claimed, could even put a man on the moon. Despite NASA's success, the decade ended with a tu- mult of dashed hopes - defeat in Vietnam, economic stagnation, political assassination, Chappaquidick, and, ultimately, the disillu- sionment of Watergate. Views on poverty during the 1960s track this fall from optimism to disillusionment. The war on poverty declared by President Johnson was based on a faith that poverty could be eliminated after a brief pitched campaign led by a handful of social scientists. The aftermath of this war was an era of de- spair in which poverty was widely regarded as intractable. Martha Davis's Brutal Need: Lawyers and the Welfare Rights Movement, 1960-1973,1 provides a well written and engrossing ac- count of the efforts of a few young lawyers to wage war on poverty on their own terms. Davis focuses on the development and execu- tion of Edward Sparer's plan to beat poverty in the courtroom through a series of test cases designed to create a judicially recog- nized right to live - a right of access to the essentials of subsis- tence.2 The plan ended in failure when the Supreme Court * Associate Professor of Law, Fordham University. A.B. 1981, J.D. 1985, Harvard. - Ed. Portions of this review draw heavily on my experiences as a staff attorney in the Civil Appeals and Law Reform Unit of The Legal Aid Society in New York City from 1986 until 1993. I am grateful to many people for their help on this project and comments on drafts, including Jane Booth, Tracy Higgins, Katherine Kennedy, Christopher Lamb, Yvette LeRoy, Peter Margulies, Nancy Morawetz, Russell Pearce, Terry Smith, and Bill Treanor. I would also like to thank John Butler, Peter Mignone, and Daniel Toweil for their assistance in research. 1. Martha Davis is a staff attorney for the NOW Legal Defense and Education Fund. 2. The right to live was derived from the scholarly work of Delafield Smith and Joseph lbssman, & Jacobus tenBroek. A. DELAIMLD SmITH, Trm RIGHT TO LIFE (1955); Joseph Tussman & Jacobus tenBroek, The Equal Protection of the Laws, 37 CAL- L. REv. 341 (1949); see also Frank I. Michehnan, The Supreme Court, 1968 Term - Foreword On Protecting the Poor Through the Fourteenth Amendmen 83 HArv. L. REv. 7 (1969). For a more recent 1401

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