ABSTRACT
This chapter concerns itself with the changing forms of poverty law activism and theory in the long decades since the end of the 1960s. In the late 1970s and early 1908s, poverty law descended into crisis as it became subject to "hostile and unrelenting political pressures". Hard distinctions between political movements and new social movements or between class-based and identity-based conceptions of politics produced no real insights. The Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act became law in August 1996 and brought in a number of sweeping changes. The changes in welfare administration show how the agenda was slowly shifting away from welfare practices inherited from the New Deal and to new forms of accountability and "quality control". LatCrit represented a re-focusing of critical ideas with self-assurance reminiscent of the new left.
