To Promote the General Welfare: The Republican Imperative to Enhance Citizenship Welfare Rights
42 Pages Posted: 4 Aug 2005
Abstract
This Note revisits the jurisprudential and conceptual case for substantive welfare rights. Its objective is two-fold: to make sense of the failed attempts to incorporate substantive welfare rights into our constitutional canon and to propose an alternative legal foundation for promoting those rights. Ultimately, it seeks to develop a theory of citizenship welfare rights premised on the understanding that affirmative rights to basic resources are necessary to enable individuals to engage meaningfully in a participatory democracy.
Keywords: constitutional law, welfare law, poverty law, Fourteenth Amendment, civic republicanism, substantive due process
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