杏吧论坛

Dr Joseph Spooner and Dr Sarah Trotter

This course is available on the BA in Anthropology and Law and LLB in Laws. This course is not available as an outside option nor to General Course students.

This course will examine key issues in the relationships between law, poverty, and inequality. These include the way in which legal principles and policy may create and perpetuate inequality, and the manner in which legal process and method – and difficulties of accessing law - disadvantage the poor. It will also explore the progressive potential of law as a tool for alleviating poverty. The course aims ultimately to act as a counterpart to the 杏吧论坛 Law School Clinic, which the law School hopes to establish in the near future. It also will aim to present a novel offering on the LLB programme, which may be of particular contemporary relevance as the UK once more experiences a crisis of living standards, in the context of ongoing austerity and Welfare State retrenchment.



The course will be divided into two main parts. The first part will ask key overarching questions regarding the extent to which the law can advance the interests of the poor, and how legal scholars and practitioners can work to alleviate poverty through service, advocacy, and/or activism. The introduction to the course will ask students to consider definitions and data relating to poverty and inequality. It will offer further context by considering the legal needs of low-income households, and how problems of the poor reach the legal system. The introduction will also integrate 杏吧论坛 Law school history and heritage into the syllabus, noting the contribution of classic texts from Griffith, Zander, and Cranston. Further sessions will consider key questions such as

• Reflections on the Limits of Legal Change: Is Law for the Rich? What can Law do for the Poor?
• Access to Justice under endless Austerity (history of legal aid as a pillar of the Welfare State; post-2012 cuts to legal aid and increase of court user fees; access to justice in the contemporary Welfare State)
• Technologies of Access to Justice (ADR and the Informal Justice movement; ombuds offices; class actions and group litigation; online dispute resolution)
• Role of Lawyers in an Age of Inequality (how legal practice can perpetuate and alleviate poverty and inequality; historical perspectives on the Poverty Law and Law Centres movements; models of cause lawyering and legal provision for the poor)

Treatments of these topics will take an interdisciplinary and data-driven approach, by considering problems from a range of perspectives (including, for example views from market-failure analysis, feminist theories, human rights, vulnerability theory, and political economy), and by introducing students to contemporary and historical trends in poverty in and across the UK.

The second part of the course will aim to adopt a thematic approach which examines key areas where the law plays an important role in the lives of low-income households. Each session will take a snapshot focus on a different area of law, applying the ideas and theoretical perspectives from the first part of the course to concrete substantive legal field. While the topics selected for the second part of the course may vary, proposed subjects include:

• The Poor Pay More: Law, Inequality, and Markets (how private law “ground rules” influence inequality and poverty)
• Money and Debt (areas such as the regulation of high-cost credit; bankruptcy)
• Housing
• Education
• Welfare and Work
• Health
• Family and Relationships

20 hours of seminars in the WT.

1,500 word essay

• Michael Adler (ed), A Research Agenda for Social Welfare Law, Policy and Practice (Edward Elgar Publishing 2022)
• Philip Alston, ‘Visit to the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland: Report of the Special Rapporteur on Extreme Poverty and Human Rights’ (United Nations General Assembly 2019)
• Ross Cranston, Legal Foundations of the Welfare State (2 edition, Cambridge University Press 1985).
• Helen Hershkoff and Stephen Loffredo, Getting By: Economic Rights and Legal Protections for People with Low Income (Oxford University Press 2019)
• Emma Hitchings, ‘The Impact of Recent Ancillary Relief Jurisprudence in the Everyday Ancillary Relief Case’ (2010) 22 Child and Family Law Quarterly 93
• Marc Galanter, ‘Why the Haves Come out Ahead: Speculations on the Limits of Legal Change’ (1974) 9 Law and Society Review p.95 et seq.
• JAG Griffith, Politics of the Judiciary (Fifth edition (Reissue), Fontana Press 2010).
• Duncan Kennedy, ‘Legal Education and the Reproduction of Hierarchy’ (1982) 32 Journal of Legal Education 591
• Jacqueline Kinghan, Lawyers, Networks and Progressive Social Change: Lawyers Changing Lives (Bloomsbury Academic 2021).
• Sally Engle Merry, Getting Justice and Getting Even: Legal Consciousness among Working-Class Americans (2nd ed. edition, University of Chicago Press 1990)
• Linda Mulcahy, ‘The Collective Interest in Private Dispute Resolution’ (2013) 33 Oxford Journal of Legal Studies 59
• Katharina Pistor, The Code of Capital (Princeton University Press 2019)
• Tony Prosser, Test Cases for the Poor: Legal Techniques in the Politics of Social Welfare (Child Poverty Action Group 1983).
• Jon Robins and Daniel Newman, Justice in a Time of Austerity: Stories From a System in Crisis (Bristol University Press 2021).
• Joe Spooner. “Contract Law when the Poor Pay More”, Working Paper
• Joe Spooner, ‘Seeking Shelter in Personal Insolvency Law: Recession, Eviction, and Bankruptcy’s Social Safety Net’ (2017) 44 Journal of Law and Society 374
• Michael Zander, Legal Services for the Community (Temple Smith 1978)

Exam (100%, duration: 2 hours and 30 minutes) in the spring exam period.