Dear reader, Thank you for reading Issue 2 of Volume 33 of the Georgetown Journal on Poverty Law and Policy. As the nation’s first law journal focused on advancing scholarship that grapples with and presents solutions to poverty-related issues, we are eager to share these six timely, thought-provoking pieces with you. In Issue 2, you […]

“Add a tip?” Maybe you just don’t want to—but tipped workers can’t afford for you not to. Across the country, service workers are twice as likely to live in poverty as their non-tipped counterparts, yet Congress has now chosen to exempt a portion of their tips from income tax. The One Big Beautiful Bill Act […]

This Article describes an existential legal and factual conflict about residential segregation. It is centered in a neighborhood a few blocks north of where George Floyd—and more recently Renee Good—were murdered. Five years before Floyd’s murder, the conflict reached a breaking point, resulting in three lawsuits. One involved federal civil rights and two involved state […]

From coast to coast, in communities large and small, tenants are organizing together into tenant unions to leverage their collective power. This movement is both a response and the solution to our current, but deeply rooted, housing crisis. Tenant-led housing solutions provide necessary alternatives to the predominance of supply-side “abundance” solutions that do not address […]

Debt collection cases dominate state court civil dockets in Massachusetts and across the country. Extant scholarship regarding debt collection in the courts has focused on what makes it easy for creditors to churn out this “assembly line litigation,” including repeat plaintiffs and passive courts. Some light has also been shed on creditors’ counsel in these […]

“I cannot go into court on my own again. . . . The attorney is not understanding. . . . I am near tears. . . . He said that I am lying about my disability.” I was surprised when I received that e-mail from Sarah, a former client. She was collection-proof—all of her income […]

This Note argues that Minnesota’s prenatal substance use statutes, enacted in response to the racialized “crack baby” panic of the late 1980s, violate the state constitutional protections for reproductive rights affirmed in Doe v. Gomez and codified in the 2023 Protect Reproductive Options (PRO) Act. By classifying prenatal substance use as child abuse, these laws […]