New Poverty Law Textbook includes Human Rights Chapter

Many of you have probably received notice of the forthcoming textbook, Poverty Law: Policy and Practice, authored by Juliette Brody, Claire Pastore, Ezra Rosner and Jeffrey Selbin, published by Aspen.  The book’s webpage is here.  

Poverty Law isn’t published yet, but I recently had the opportunity to review an advance copy.  As you would expect from these authors, this is an excellent book, made all the better by the inclusion of a chapter on “human rights based approaches to poverty reduction.”  Among other things, the human rights chapter includes an in-depth case study of advocacy for the right to water and sanitation in Sacramento, California.  The chapter reproduces documents generated by the UN Special Rapporteur who intervened on behalf of homeless community members seeking basic sanitation rights, as well as advocacy documents prepared by legal services lawyers that utilize a human rights framework.

By including this material, the textbook underscores the many connections between traditional poverty law practice and human rights advocacy.  These connections are being further explored by participants in the Local Lawyering Project of American University, Washington College of Law; Maryland Legal Aid; and Texas Rio Grande Legal Aid.  For more information on this fascinating and ambitious project for implementing human rights in daily legal aid practice, check out the project webpage. 

Project Director Lauren Bartlett will be blogging in this space in the coming weeks.

While much ink has been spilled on the question of judicial citation of international law, much less has been done to truly integrate human rights law into routine law school instruction.  By introducing human rights into clinical and poverty law courses, this new textbook takes an important step toward training law students to use the full range of available advocacy tools for their constituencies.  I do fear that because the human rights chapter is the last in the book, some instructors may be tempted to skip it entirely as just a “special” topic not central to the course.  Particularly since the chapter presents such a rich domestic human rights case study, I hope my fear proves to be unfounded.