Jack Katz has written the first case study of legal assistance lawyers—commonly known as poverty lawyers—and their agencies. Focusing on legal services for the poor over the last 100 years in Chicago, the city with the most experienced large staff of poverty reform lawyers in the nation, Katz examines what organizational and personal experiences make these lawyers either passive or entrepreneurial in their drive for equal justice for the poor. This historical and participant-observation study traces the social foundations of the aspiration for equal justice. In the 1880s, when lawyers were first hired by organizations specifically to assist the poor, the legal status of poverty was virtually non-existent. Today the legal status of the poor is defined affirmatively in scores of statues, in masses of highly differentiated administrative regulations, and in a rich case law of judicial decisions made in the last 20 years. During the rise and fall of the Progressive era, throughout the Depression and the New Deal, in the midst of the explosive public activism of the Sixties, and even after the internment of the War on Poverty, legal assistance lawyers have worked progressively toward the legalization of poverty. Recently, a disturbing irony has appeared in this progress. Legal assistance lawyers, especially the most aggressive and professionally creative, have proven less successful in eliminating poverty than in reorganizing the poor into a formal social category. This category is systematically, comprehensively, and predictably defined by law, and administratively maintained by the state in segregation from the working and middle classes.

Jack Katz
Professor of Sociology, UCLA
Department of Sociology
University of California at Los Angeles
Los Angeles, CA 90095-1551
office phone: (310) 825-6904; FAX: (310) 206 9838
JackKatz@soc.ucla.edu
http://www.sscnet.ucla.edu/soc/faculty/katz
EDUCATION:
Northwestern University
Degree: Ph.D. (Sociology), 1976.
University of Chicago Law School
Degree: J.D., 1969.
Colgate University
Degree: B.A., 1966.
FACULTY CAREER:
Yale Law School, 1977-1979. Research Associate.
UCLA, Assistant Professor of Sociology, 1979; Associate Professor, 1982; Professor, 1989.
MISCELLANEOUS PROFESSIONAL EXPERIENCE:
Russell Sage Law and Society Fellow, 1973-1975, Yale Law School.
Consulting Editor, American Journal of Sociology, 1977-1979; Associate Editor, Symbolic Interaction,
1995-1999; American Sociological Review, 2001-4.
Trustee, Law and Society Association, 1984-1986.
Consulting for university presses, law and social science journals, defense in death penalty cases.
Co-Editor, with Robert Emerson, of “Field Encounters and Discoveries,” an ethnographic book series
for the University of Chicago Press.
TEACHING SPECIALIZATIONS:
Social Interaction and Phenomenology; Ethnographic Methods; Urban Sociology.