Baylor University, BA 1969
University of Chicago, JD 1974
Office: 37 Cargill Hall
Mail: 400 Huntington Avenue, Boston, MA 02115
Tel: (617) 373-4537
Fax: (617) 373-5056
E-mail: lu.williams@neu.edu
Lucy A. Williams
A nationally recognized authority on welfare law and low-wage labor, Professor Williams focuses on the dependency created in low-wage labor relationships, and how the political rhetoric connecting "dependency" with receipt of welfare has diverted attention from the structural issues within low-wage labor markets. She has a long and impressive record as both an academic and a litigator in the areas of unemployment insurance, Social Security and related welfare programs.
In recent years, she has expanded her work to address issues of global poverty and she is currently serving a two-year term on the Scientific Committee for the Comparative Research Programme on Poverty which focuses on law and development in 'lesser developed' countries. Prior to joining the Northeastern faculty, she was an attorney with the Massachusetts Law Reform Institute for 12 years. Professor Williams teaches in the area of social welfare law, and has written articles for publications including the Yale Law Journal and Politics and Society, and is involved in the law school’s Legal Skills in Social Context program. In 1994-1995, she was honored by the school as the Public Interest Distinguished Professor.
- International Poverty: An Emerging Discourse, ed. Zed Books, 2006.
- “Beyond Labour Law’s Parochialism: A Re-Envisioning of the Discourse of Redistribution,” Labor Law in an Era of Globalization: Transformative Practices and Possibilities. Conaghan, ed. Oxford University Press, 2002.
- “Unemployment Insurance and Low Wage Work,” Hard Labor: Women and Work in the Post-Welfare Era. Handler and White, eds. 1999.
- Decades of Distortion: The Right’s 30-year Assault on Welfare, Political Research Associates, 1997.
- “Rethinking Low-Wage Markets and Dependency,” 25 Politics & Society 539, 1997.
- “The Mythogenesis of Gender: Judicial Images of Women in Paid and Unpaid Labor” (with Brown and Baumann), 6 UCLA Women’s Law Journal 457, 1996.
- “Race, Rat Bites, and Unfit Mothers: How Media Discourse Informs Welfare Legislation Debate,” 22 University of Detroit Urban Law Journal 1159, 1995.
- “The Abuse of §1115 Waivers: Welfare Reform in Search of a Standard,” 12 Yale Law and Policy Review 8, 1994.
- “The Ideology of Division: Behavior Modification Welfare Reform Proposals,” 102 Yale Law Journal 719, December 1992.
- “The Massachusetts Employment and Training Program” (with Savner and Halas), 20 Clearinghouse Review 123, June 1986.
