Legal Aid and Social Policy: Managing a Political Economy of Scarcity

Civil legal systems structure Americans’ relationship to the welfare state, offering grounds for contesting denials of benefits and preventing material harms like eviction. I draw on data from interviews with legal aid providers and tenant organizers to show how civil legal resources facilitate access to the safety net, and I argue that yoking legal aid and social policy is a strategy for managing a political economy that systematically undersupplies essential resources and protections. Notwithstanding the democratic ideal of social and civil rights as self-reinforcing and mutually constitutive, the relationship between social policy and civil legal aid underscores how these domains operate as substitutes rather than complements. Politically induced scarcity makes it necessary to leverage legal mechanisms to protect vulnerable Americans. Such necessity implicates acute democratic deficits that are most aptly addressed through fundamental changes to existing power relations.