Poverty Law Prof Blog

Downloadable Video of (older) Symposium on The Low-Wage Worker

Videos of the panels 2007 Minnesota Law Review Symposium on The Low-Wage Worker: Legal Rights--Legal Realities from Nov. 7, 2007 are available on their website.  The panels focus on minimum wage legislation, organizing strategies, immigrant workers, and big box stores. 

-E.R. erosser@wcl.american.edu

Good Mapping Source: Dataplace.org

For those looking for a great resource for understanding how cities change over time or who want to look at demographics such as poverty rates in different parts of a city, www.dataplace.org is GREAT!  I have only begun to explore their map feature, but by entering particular cities, you can get a good sense of the changes that have taken place between 1990 and 2000.  Dataplace also launched www.foreclosure-response.org that has a good mapping feature related to the current crisis. 

-E.R. erosser@wcl.american.edu

Web Resource: Chicago-Kent 2008 Financial Crisis Primer

A new very helpful compilation of materials on the crisis can be found at the Chicago-Kent 2008 Financial Crisis Primer webpage. 

-Thanks to Brian Leiter's Law School Reports for the heads up! E.R. erosser@wcl.american.edu

New Blog and New Book: "Philanthrocapitalism"

Bob Giloth, the Director of the Family Economic Success Initiative at the Annie E. Casey Foundation, has a new blog, www.bobgiloth.com, available here. 

A recent post of interest for example calls attention to "Philanthrocapitalism," and the new book by Matthew Bishop & Michael Green, Philanthrocapitalism: How the Rich Can Save the World (2008).  See also, Michael Edwards, Just Another Emperor? The Myths and Realities of Philanthrocapitalism (2008), blogged about by Bob Giloth here. 

-Thanks to Josh Nelson for the heads up!  E.R. erosser@wcl.american.edu

Blog worth checking out: Dissenting Justice

Darren Hutchinson, a colleague of mine at AU, has a new blog worth bookmarking (from the length of his posts you can already tell he is busy with it!): Dissenting Justice.  Not surprisingly, the focus right now is on the financial crisis; here is one sample post, "Bringing Back Welfare as We Know It: My Indignant Take on the Wall Street Bail-Out." 

-E.R. erosser@wcl.american.edu

Library Listings of Poverty Law Resources

Many libraries have put together pages focusing on Poverty law and I am going to start making a list that I am happy to update with any additional pages that are sent to my email. 

• Univ. of Minnesota Law Library's resource page
• Georgetown Law Center's resource page

• Australia's Parliamentary Library's page on welfare law in Australia

-E.R. erosser@wcl.american.edu

Instructions on subscribing to this blog

There are a number of ways to subscribe to blogs, but since I have gotten a number of questions on this, one way is to enter your email address in the space to the right of the blog page under feedburner, or go to: http://feeds.feedburner.com/PovertyLawProfBlog.

-E.R. erosser@wcl.american.edu

Charity Information and Rankings

Charity rankings and information dissemination got some attention from the N.Y. Times on Dec. 20, 2007 in an article profiling www.givewell.net (the article is "2 Young Hedge Fund Veterans Stir Up the World of Philanthropy" by Stephanie Strom).  There are a number of resources for evaluating charities:

• www.charitynavigator.org/
• www.guidestar.org/index.jsp (recently added an online donation mechanism)
• www.give.org/reports/index.asp (featuring reports on national charities from the BBB)
• www.givewell.net

Only loosely relatedly, Harvard's Hauser Center for Nonprofit Organizations has posted a lot of again loosely related research on their website. 

-E.R. erosser@wcl.american.edu
[NOTE: I'm going to be traveling to El Salvador for the holidays and will only be online periodically, so please excuse the silence -- somewhat normal this month considering postings were also minimal during my time in Ecuador and Peru during the last couple of weeks.]