Document Type

Book Review

Publication Date

2010

Abstract

Welfare's Forgotten Past: A Socio-Legal History of the Poor Law is a timely reminder of society's legal duty to the poor. In an era of global economic turmoil, with recent welfare reform and heated debates over the extension of unemployment benefits here in the United States, it is easy to forget that laws for the relief of poverty have roots reaching back more than 400 years. Author Lorie Charlesworth, Reader in Law and History at Liverpool John Moores University, focuses her book on the poor law-a historical, English system derived largely from the seventeenth-century laws of settlement and removal, which provided support for the settled poor within their home parishes.

Publication Citation

102 Law Libr. J. 644 (2010) (reviewing Lorie Charlesworth, Welfare's Forgotten Past: A Socio-Legal History of the Poor Law (2010)).

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