Welfare law is a field integral to most jurisprudential formulations, whether artificially designated as doctrinal, theoretical or practical. However, within both the legal academy and practice, welfare law has been marginalized and viewed as a field that does not connect to any but a small sector of lawyers and legal clients. Isolated as an arcane domain of either statutory and regulatory legal minutiae or jurisprudential insignificance, welfare law has never realized its potential as a major hub for legal theoretical discourse.;The articles in this volume seek to expose the roots of the essentialized view of welfare law as non-essential. The editor has chosen articles in which the authors aim to engage with much of the contemporary political and societal rhetoric underlying the retrenchment, to reflect many of the important tensions within the field, and to assist in re-envisioning. Such an endeavour requires an understanding of poverty beyond a traditional class-based analysis, viewing it through the lens of multiple complex interactions of alienage, gender, race and class, both internal to a nation-state and cross-border. Thus this work provides a critique both of the majoritarian ""consensus"" regarding welfare law and the failure of traditional, albeit left, welfare scholarship to struggle with the intersectionality of alienage, gender, race and class.