Dear reader,

As the first law journal in the nation to focus on poverty law and economic justice, the Georgetown Journal on Poverty Law & Policy (GJPLP) seeks to demonstrate how poverty impacts much more than wealth inequality alone—it creates and upholds systems of power, control, surveillance, and resource distribution. Since our journal’s founding, we have worked to bridge the divide between academia and praxis. Our charge—to fight poverty—enables us to explore legal and policy solutions across a wide array of practice areas. Volume 33 continues this tradition.

A lot has happened since we began to put together this first issue in GJPLP’s thirty-third volume.

We experienced the cost of living become even more unaffordable as the economy teeters on the brink of a recession. We watched the Trump Administration demolish agencies like the Department of Education and pillage social safety-net programs like SNAP and Medicaid. We witnessed armed federal troops infiltrate our city and masked Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents abduct our friends and neighbors. We endured the longest federal government shutdown in history, only to see it reopen with a bipartisan agreement to abandon tax credits that make private health insurance moderately less out-of-reach for millions of Americans. As law students in the nation’s capital, the past year has been, in a word, demoralizing.

Yet we pressed onward. As a journal, we raised over $7,500 in mutual aid for families facing hunger and basic needs insecurity across D.C. during the government shutdown. We began planning our bi-annual symposium, which will feature scholarship and organizing that coalesces around a timely theme, From the Ground Up: Self-Determination & Local Autonomy in the Fight Against Poverty. Our staff worked tirelessly to edit the work in this volume, recognizing that law shapes reality, and that as a law journal, we help shape the law.

We are delighted to share this first issue with you. It begins with an article by ACLU of Southern California practitioner Jonathan Markovitz that grapples with what it means to be a movement (or movement-adjacent) lawyer, using the ACLU’s decades-long battle against a degrading and punitive welfare scheme as a case study. What follows is an article by Professor Rama Hyeweon Kim that draws on in-depth, first-in-kind research into Kentucky’s parentage laws to challenge normative assumptions about and explore unrecognized costs of functional parenthood laws, particularly for poor and racialized communities.

The student notes were written by current and recently graduated GJPLP editors. Both notes explore housing policy, though through very different lenses. First, current Online Editor Jack Ross-Pilkington explores social housing models domestically and abroad to suggest how local governments might increase access to affordable housing more feasibly and sustainably. Second, former Staff Editor Julia M. Baumel writes on how tenant screening tools discriminate against people with criminal records and analyzes the promises and pitfalls of a Biden-era proposed regulation that could address some of these issues. In conversation with these two notes is a Community Voices piece authored by student advocates at Rising for Justice, a housing law clinic, that brings to light the harsh realities fac-ing those forced to navigate the legal and practical barriers of D.C.’s landlord-tenant courts.

As we begin Volume 33, we want to thank our authors for their brilliance and for entrusting us with their scholarship; our incredible team of staff editors for their labor of love editing such important work with painstaking commitment; our Board of Advisors and the Office of Journal Affairs for their unwavering support and investment in our development; and finally, you, our reader, for taking the time to grapple with the deeply entrenched problems we explore within these pages and, we hope, for making yourself a part of collective efforts to solve them.

In solidarity,

Sarah Minion, Editor-in-Chief, Vol. 33
Erika Anclade, General Managing Editor, Vol. 33
Yaseen Hashmi, Articles Managing Editor, Vol. 33
Shawn Ali, Notes Managing Editor, Vol. 33
Julia Tecotzky, Community Voices Managing Editor, Vol. 33
Rebecca Wilson, Online Managing Editor, Vol. 33