Most scholars of U.S. poverty policy cite the Center on Social Welfare Policy and Law as the engine driving a dramatic expansion in the rights of America’s poorest families to receive federally funded aid. Founded in 1965 by Ed Sparer, a Communist Party activist and garment union lawyer turned “welfare law guru,” the Center crafted a litigation strategy that assisted poverty lawyers across the United States in mounting cases intended to overturn state laws limiting poor people’s rights to public assistance. Between 1965 and 1970 they went a long way, though definitely not all the way, toward achieving that goal.
In three short years, Sparer and his legion of poverty lawyers won three famous U.S. Supreme Court victories—King v. Smith (1968), Shapiro v. Thompson (1969), and Goldberg v. Kelly (1970)—that established poor people’s right to welfare as an entitlement of American citizenship. King v. Smith overturned “substitute father” rules...