Legal History of Epidemics by Felice Batlan
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Papers by Felice Batlan
Cambridge University Press eBooks, May 5, 2015
Social Science Research Network, 2011
Social Science Research Network, 2007
Law and Social Inquiry-journal of The American Bar Foundation, Mar 2, 2007
Law and History Review, 2008
... One such gap is that the biography does not give the reader a full understanding of Lockwood&... more ... One such gap is that the biography does not give the reader a full understanding of Lockwood's interior life, what motivated her, or what drew her to the many causes in which Book Reviews 449 Page 3. 450 Law and History Review, Summer 2008 she participated. ...
Social Science Research Network, 2015
Social Science Research Network, Jul 19, 2018
Donald Trump's administration has provoked crisis after crisis regarding the United States’ i... more Donald Trump's administration has provoked crisis after crisis regarding the United States’ immigration policy, laws, and their enforcement. This has affected millions of immigrants in the U.S. and those hoping to immigrate. Stemming from this, immigration lawyers are providing extraordinary amounts of direct pro bono legal services to immigrants in need. Yet the history of the practice of immigration law has been largely understudied. This article closely examines Chicago's Immigrants’ Protective League between 1910 and 1940. The League provided free counsel to tens of thousands of poor immigrants facing a multitude of immigration-related legal issues during a time when Congress passed increasingly strict immigration laws. The League, always headed by women social workers, created a robust model of immigration advocacy at a time when only a handful of women were professionally trained lawyers. The League's archival documents, manifests how Trump's immigration policies have a long and painful history. U.S. immigration law and its enforcement have consistently been cruel, inhumane, arbitrary, and capricious. Told from the ground up and focusing upon the day-to-day problems that immigrants brought to the League, one dramatically sees how immigration laws and practices were like quicksand, thwarting the legitimate expectations of migrants. The League, in response, participated in creating what would become the practice of immigration law, engaging, and quickly responding to changing laws, rules, policies, and the needs of migrants.
The American Historical Review, 2008
... One such gap is that the biography does not give the reader a full understanding of Lockwood&... more ... One such gap is that the biography does not give the reader a full understanding of Lockwood's interior life, what motivated her, or what drew her to the many causes in which Book Reviews 449 Page 3. 450 Law and History Review, Summer 2008 she participated. ...
Indiana Journal of Law and Social Equality, 2016
This Symposium Article discusses an unexamined area of legal aid and legal history-the role that ... more This Symposium Article discusses an unexamined area of legal aid and legal history-the role that late nineteenth and early twentieth-century Jewish women played in the delivery of legal aid as social workers, lawyers, and, importantly, as cultural and legal brokers. It presents two such women who represented different types and models of legal aid-Minnie Low of the Chicago Bureau of Personal Service, a Jewish social welfare organization, and Rosalie Loew of the Legal Aid Society of New York. I interrogate how these women negotiated their identities as Jewish professional women, what role being Jewish and female played in shaping their careers, understandings of law, and the delivery of legal aid, as well as the constrained professional possibilities, but at times, opportunities, both women confronted. By puzzling through these issues, the complicated and fraught relationship between legal aid providers and their Eastern European Jewish immigrant clients emerges. Elaborating upon the ideas, concepts, and themes of the symposium conference, the article uncovers the voices of women and a story of the provision of legal aid which had been intentionally suppressed and written out of history. In doing so, it de-silos legal aid, demonstrating its close connections to social work. It also pays attention to class, race, religion, ethnicity, and gender, and the article's methodology ranges freely between different disciplines. Another theme that arises is the difficult question of the relationship between the provision of civil legal services to the poor and the much larger question of what constitutes justice. In a strikingly disheartening manner we see how many of the same problems that poor people faced at the turn of the twentieth century have changed little in the past hundred and fifty years, despite the growth of the administrative state and federally funded welfare programs. I. A VERY BRIEF HISTORY OF THE ORIGINS OF LEGAL AID 3 Women and Justice for the Poor: A History of Legal Aid, 1863-1945, my recent book, uncovers the enormous role played by women as legal aid providers and how gender ideologies shaped what legal aid consisted of and who would be its providers and clients. It excavates the "true" history of legal aid, a story which leaders of legal aid intentionally masked in the second decade of the twentieth century as legal aid was being professionalized. Using and analyzing thousands of pages of archival documents, the book addresses how various actors, including women lay providers of legal aid, social workers, and lawyers, constructed types of authority, the ambiguity of what it meant to be an attorney, and the complex and fraught interactions between lawyers and social workers over who would provide legal aid to the poor and what assistance would be provided. Thus, 3
Women and Justice for the Poor
New York University Press eBooks, 2011
Stanford Journal of Civil Rights and Civil Liberties, 2020
Recently the realm of divorce law has attracted the attention of legal historians and theorists w... more Recently the realm of divorce law has attracted the attention of legal historians and theorists who have realized that it provides, not a backwater, but a fertile arena in which to explore the intersections of statutory law, appellate law, trial law, social change, popular culture, gender, and the complicated behavior of individual litigants cast in the role of adversaries but formerly lovers, intimates, and family members. Perhaps in no other area of law have formal requirements and rules so differed from the lived realities of peoples’ lives. Furthermore, within these interstices appear the age-old questions: does law shape culture, does culture shape law, or are the two are one and the same? Recently, two valuable books–by Hendrik Hartog and Norma Basch[1]–present remarkably rich and complicated narratives of the changing course of American divorce law in the nineteenth century and the multitude of ideologies that shaped it. J. Herbie DiFonzo’s Beneath the Fault Line, which appea...
Oxford Research Encyclopedia of American History, 2021
Legal aid organizations were first created by a variety of private groups during the Civil War to... more Legal aid organizations were first created by a variety of private groups during the Civil War to provide legal advice in civil cases to the poor. The growing need for legal aid was deeply connected to industrialization, urbanization, and immigration. A variety of groups created legal aid organizations in response to labor unrest, the increasing number of women in the workforce, the founding of women’s clubs, and the slow and incomplete professionalization of the legal bar. In fact, before women could practice law, or were accepted into the legal profession, a variety of middle-class women’s groups using lay lawyers provided legal aid to poor women. Yet, this rich story of women’s work was later suppressed by leaders of the bar attempting to claim credit for legal aid, assert a monopoly over the practice of law, and professionalize legal assistance. Across time, the largest number of claims brought to legal aid providers involved workers trying to collect wages, domestic relations c...
Social Service Review, 2020
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Legal History of Epidemics by Felice Batlan
Papers by Felice Batlan