“Of course nobody has a constitutional right to go on the relief rolls,” declared U.S. District Court judge Alexander Holtzoff on October 7, 1966. “Relief payments are a gratuity or a grant”; they are “not a debt” owed by the government. Such was one jurist's reaction to a court challenge from the new cohort of poverty lawyers – in this case, an attempt to enjoin the allegedly “harsh, oppressive, illegal and humiliating methods” that public welfare investigators applied to recipients of Aid to Families with Dependent Children in the District of Columbia. In the face of the judge's skepticism, legal aid attorney David Marlin backpedaled, emphasizing the modesty of his clients’ position: these poor mothers merely contended that if a woman satisfied the statutory eligibility requirements, she had “a right to welfare” – and thereafter should not be subject to intrusive administrative monitoring. Judge Holtzoff was unmoved. “Welfare is discretionary,” he repeated. Eligibility rules existed “to exclude,” not to entitle. Case dismissed.

A Truman appointee and a former legal advisor to President Roosevelt's Committee on Economic Security, Holtzoff might have been expected to be more sympathetic, but by 1966, a year away from his retirement from the bench, he was notoriously conservative and acted accordingly. Other federal court judges confronted with welfare rights claims in the late 1960s would take a different approach. Judge Holtzoff's response does, however, highlight the inherent risks of taking such claims to court: doing so raised the prospects of creating unfavorable legal precedents, attracting negative publicity, and making enemies out of the very people who controlled poor claimants’ livelihoods. Why, then, is that where welfare rights claims migrated, and what were the consequences?

In tracing the judicial articulation of welfare rights, this chapter begins with the tumultuous stretch between the middle of 1963 and the close of 1965. These were the months when Americans witnessed a historic march on Washington, the launching of a “war on poverty,” and the enactment of the most significant civil rights protections since Reconstruction. These were also the months in which scattered interest in the field of poverty law began to translate into actual litigation. From Oakland, California, to upstate New York, a loose network of civil rights advocates, civil libertarians, and public welfare professionals started going to court to contest the restrictive and discriminatory policies that pervaded public assistance administration.