Andrew Hammond (Indiana University Maurer School of Law) has posted Welfare Litigation, State Courts, and Social Citizenship on SSRN. Here is the abstract:
For half a century, federal courts have stood at the center of welfare rights enforcement. That era is ending. The One Big Beautiful Bill Act’s historic cuts to Medicaid and SNAP will generate an avalanche of benefit terminations, work requirement sanctions, and overpayment actions from state agencies. And with a federal judiciary increasingly hostile to the private enforcement of public law, state courts will become not just a concurrent forum for welfare litigation, but an increasingly important one. Understanding how state courts have handled welfare litigation over the past three decades, then, is essential to anticipating what comes next. This Article is the first to offer a typology of state court review of welfare administration across the United States over the last thirty years. Cases decided since the 1996 Welfare Reform Act reveal three distinct categories of litigation—challenges to agency decisions brought by claimants, overpayment actions brought by states, and reimbursement disputes brought by providers—each with different doctrinal patterns and access-to-justice concerns. The resulting picture challenges two scholarly understandings: the federal courts as the premier fora for civil rights, and state courts as mere sites of routinized dispute processing. State courts regularly adjudicate public benefit controversies, often involving unrepresented claimants, and have developed distinctive approaches to reviewing agency action. organizational infrastructure capable of transforming individual grievances into systemic challenges. The welfare rights tradition need not end, but it must find a new home.
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