Opinion ID: 1115867
Heading Depth: 2
Heading Rank: 1

Heading: Statutory Duty of Support

Text: The Elizabethan poor laws, including the provision requiring family members to support their needy relatives, provided a model for the systems of public support found in most American jurisdictions, including our own and those of New York. tenBroek, California's Dual System of Family Law: Its Origin, Development and Present Status, Part I, 16 Stan L Rev 257, 258 (1964). The Elizabethan poor laws came into being in response to the demise of the power and wealth of religious institutions, which had assumed the burden to support the poor, and the subsequent unrest manifested in widespread vagrancy and begging that unassuaged poverty engendered. Professor tenBroek writes that the poor laws culminated the process of shifting the burden to alleviate poverty from the ecclesiastical, private and voluntary to the civil, public and compulsory. tenBroek, supra at 282. In the Elizabethan system, support of the poor was achieved by taxation and was regulated at the county level. As a corollary, these statutes included features intended to reduce the burden on the public treasury. For example, the poor laws mandated forced labor at fixed wages for all paupers capable of working. They relocated the poor to the parishes of their birth and limited their mobility. They provided criminal sanctions for vagrancy, begging and refusing to work if able. Finally, they compelled financially able relatives to contribute to the support of family members who were public charges. [3] This last law, 43 Eliz 1, c. 2, § 7 (1601), provided: And be it further enacted, That the father and grandfather, and the mother and grandmother, and the children of every poor, old, blind, lame and impotent person, or other poor person not able to work, being of a sufficient ability, shall, at their own charges, relieve and maintain every such poor person in that manner, and according to that rate, as by the justices of peace of that county where such sufficient persons dwell, or the greater number of them, at their general quarter-sessions shall be assessed; (2) upon pain that every one of them shall forfeit twenty shillings for every month which they shall fail therein. This law found its way into the American statutes regulating public support of the poor, discussed infra.