Welfare Litigation, State Courts, and Social Citizenship

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 state court welfare litigation—challenges to agency decisions brought by claimants, overpayment actions brought by states, and reimbursement disputes brought by providers. Each of these three types of cases follow different doctrinal patterns and raise distinct access-to-justice concerns. The resulting picture challenges scholarly understandings of 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. Beyond doctrine, this Article considers what it would take for state courts to become meaningful sites for anti-poverty advocacy. State courts, unbound by much of federal doctrine and empowered by distinctive constitutional traditions, could become crucial fora to vindicate claims of social citizenship. This Article points the way with reforms tailored to each category of litigation, from expanded legal representation in eligibility disputes to heightened scrutiny of overpayment procedures to intervention rights for claimants in provider litigation. Realizing this potential, however, requires more than doctrinal reform. It demands investment in legal representation and organizational infrastructure capable of transforming individual grievances into systemic and affirmative litigation challenges and advocacy strategies. The welfare rights tradition need not end, but it may need to find a new home.