This book explores the legal meaning of the radical new laws which have transformed the social security system in the last decade.It analyses legislation and case law and lays out the legal principles and concepts, which underpin the sweeping reforms, culminating in the 'welfare reform' package announced in the 2005 Budget. It also explores the policy foundations of these reforms and key administrative changes, such as the creation of a privatised 'job network' and of Centrelink as a 'payment agency' .This book also explores the tension between traditional 'protective' functions of social security and the contemporary focus on 'activation', reciprocity and 'capacity-building', and the extent to which social changes have altered the form of Australian welfare. It reviews the history and transformation of the welfare state, the ideas about the nature of poverty and need, and the policy choices to be made.Detailed case studies are made of the law and policy affecting key groups such as the unemployed, people with illness or disability, and sole parents, as well as the administration and review rights of welfare recipients, and the workings of income and means tests.

The aim of this book is to examine how EU law relates to and impacts on the national social security systems of the Member States. It asks three key questions. Firstly, it looks at how the internal market and its developments have eroded Member States' sovereignty over their social security systems, despite the fact that the EU has limited competence in the field. It then explores, secondly, how the Union Citizenship and, thirdly, the Charter of Fundamental Rights has affected the coordination of these regimes.

This comprehensive second edition Research Handbook discusses a wide range of timely questions and dilemmas ensuing from the present state of European social security law. Presenting a kaleidoscopic concept of social security, a new generation of leading experts identifies future lines of inquiry that are likely to dominate the discourse in the coming years.

This timely book utilises the specialised insights and experiences of those who have carried out research on different aspects of social welfare law and policy to construct an innovative post-Brexit and post-Covid 19 research agenda that identifies what needs to be studied and how this should be carried out.

Building and expanding upon the prior edition of Essentials of Health Justice, the new second edition of this unparalleled text explores the historical, structural, and legal underpinnings of racial, ethnic, gender-based, and ableist inequities in health, and provides a framework for students to consider how and why health inequity is tied to the ways that laws are structured and enforced. Additionally, it offers analysis of potential solutions and posits how law may be used as a tool to remedy health injustice. Written for a wide, interdisciplinary audience of students and scholars in public health, medicine, and law, as well as other health professions, this accessible text discusses both the systems and policies that influence health and explores opportunities to advocate for legal and policy change by public health practitioners and policymakers, physicians, health care professionals, lawyers, and lay people.

This book examines the evolution of Australian unemployment law and policy across the past 100 years. It poses the question 'How does unemployment happen?'. But it poses it in a particular way. How do we regulate work relationships, gather statistics, and administer a social welfare system so as to produce something we call 'unemployment'? And how has that changed over time? Attempts to sort workers into discrete categories – the 'employed', the 'unemployed', those 'not in the labour force' – are fraught, and do not always easily correspond with people's working lives. Across the first decades of the twentieth century, trade unionists, statisticians and advocates of social insurance in Australia as well as Britain grappled with the problem of which forms of joblessness should be classified as 'unemployment' and which should not. This book traces those debates. It also chronicles the emergence and consolidation of a specific idea of unemployment in Australia after the Second World War. It then charts the eventual unravelling of that idea, and relates that unravelling to the changing ways of ordering employment relationships. In doing so, Inventing Unemployment challenges the preconception that casual work, self-employment, and the 'gig economy' are recent phenomena. Those forms of work confounded earlier attempts to define 'unemployment' and are again unsettling our contemporary understandings of joblessness. This thought-provoking book shows that the category of 'unemployment', rather than being a taken-for-granted economic variable, has its own history, and that history is intimately related to our changing understandings of 'employment'.

The social security system of Great Britain has reached a crossroads, following the election of a Labour Government promising a 'New Age' of welfare and seemingly prepared to 'think the unthinkable' on welfare reform, at a time when public expenditure on welfare benefits has reached nearlyL100 billion per annum. In 1985 the Conservative's Green Paper on social security reform announced that the benefits system had 'lost its way'. Attempts were made to curb benefits expenditure and reduce welfare dependency, for example through better 'targeting' of needs, the reinforcement ofpersonal and family responsibility, and tighter administrative controls. The ten years from 1988 to 1998 saw the introduction of many new benefit schemes including income support, family credit, the social fund, disability living allowance, incapacity benefit, and jobseeker's allowance as well asthe increasing influence of European Law. Yet the system 'achieves too little' according to the new Government's Green Paper on welfare reform, which promises ' a new contract between the citizen and the Government, based on responsibilities and rights'. The precise form these responsibilities andrights will take remains unknown, although we already have schemes like the New Deal and proposals for stakeholder pensions. Meanwhile, social security law continues to impact upon the lives of millions of citizens.After ten years of major legislative change, and with the prospect of a new direction, this is a time to take stock and to analyse the social and legal impact of the past decade's legislation, case law, and policy, as well as considering possible reforms. The book's approach is to organise this taskthematically, particularly with regard to the social context to social security, through discrete chapters on, for example, gender and the family, disability, housing, old age, and unemployment. It is also opportune to examine the theoretical framework of state welfare and social security,particularly in the context of social rights. The book aims to provide an authoritative, contextual and critical account of how British social security law has evolved, how it operates, its substance, and its social effects.

Derived from the renowned multi-volume International Encyclopaedia of Laws, this book describes the social security regime in Slovenia. It conveys a clear working knowledge of the legal mechanics affecting health care, employment injuries and occupational diseases, incapacity to work, pensions, survivors’ benefits, unemployment benefits and services, and family benefits. The analysis covers the field of application, conditions for entitlement, calculation of benefits, financing, the institutional framework, and relevant law enforcement and controls. Allowances for retirees, employees, public sector workers, the self-employed, and the handicapped are all clearly explained, along with full details of claims, adjudication procedures, and appeals. Succinct yet eminently practical, the book will be a valuable resource for lawyers handling social security matters in Slovenia. It will be of practical utility to those both in public service and private practice called on to develop and to apply social security law and policy, and of special interest as a contribution to the comparative study of social security systems.

What does conservatism, as a body of political thought, say about the legal regulation of intimate relationships, and to what extent has this thought influenced the Conservative Party's approach to family law? With this question as its focus, this book explores the relationship between family law, conservatism and the Conservative Party since the 1980s. Taking a politico- and socio-legal perspective, the discussion draws on an expansive reading of Hansard as well as recently released archival material. The study first sets out the political tradition of conservatism, relying largely on the work of Edmund Burke, before going on to analyse the discourse around the development of four crucial statutes in the field, namely: the Matrimonial and Family Proceedings Act 1984; the Family Law Act 1996; the Civil Partnership Act 2004; and the Marriage (Same Sex Couples) Act 2013. This work offers the first extended synthesis of family law, conservative political thought and Conservative Party politics, and as such provides significant new insight into how family law is made. Runner up of the 2020 PSA Conservatism Studies Book Prize.