Edward V. Sparer devoted his career to transforming the legal landscape for Americans living in poverty, pioneering legal strategies that remain central to public interest law . He championed systemic legal reforms, using strategic litigation and policy advocacy to expand protections for those most in need.
“He’s often thought of in legal services parlance as the ‘Father of Poverty Law,’” said Lou Rulli, Practice Professor of Law and Director of the Civil Practice and Legislative Clinics at the University of Pennsylvania Carey Law School. “He was a giant — a giant — in poverty law.”
Sparer envisioned a legal system that provided structural support for those facing economic hardship rather than relying solely on individual casework. Inspired by the success of the civil rights movement, he employed class action lawsuits and impact litigation to drive systemic change. His work helped secure landmark legal victories that continue to shape public interest law today.
Beyond his litigation successes, Sparer was deeply committed to mentoring the next generation of public interest lawyers. As a professor at Penn from 1969 until his untimely passing in 1983, he inspired countless students to pursue careers in poverty law. Much of his most important work emanated from the halls of the Law School, where an annual symposium highlighting public interest issues named in his honor has become a cornerstone event.
A Galvanizing Scholar
As a professor at the Law School, Sparer’s reputation as a pioneer in what was then called poverty law drew students eager to explore a field that was largely uncharted in legal education at the time.
“It was a time in which so much of the law and so much of what lawyers were about was serving privileged people who had financial means,” said Rulli.
Sparer’s passion and tireless efforts spawned many careers in public interest that have, in turn, affected countless lives.
Cathy Carr L’79, for instance, arrived at the Law School with ambitions of advancing women’s rights. A first-year course changed everything for her, including the trajectory of what would become a distinguished career in public interest law.
“(Professors) Ed Sparer and Howard Lesnick got together and somehow convinced the faculty and administration of the Law School that one of the first-year courses should be what they called ‘income maintenance,’ which was basically about government programs for people living in poverty,” Carr said, adding that Medicaid was a relatively new program then. “Right now, the idea that the class would be one of the required eight or 10 courses every first-year law student should take is kind of wild.”
The Honorable Aida Waserstein L’73, who was attracted to the Law School because of Sparer’s reputation, remembers the income maintenance class well. One of Sparer’s assignments involved students living on a welfare budget for a month, she said. A classmate suspended the experiment to travel to California for spring break. “If you ate what you could buy at Acme, you couldn’t go on vacation for a week,” she said. “So we learned a lot from it.” Judge Waserstein went on to serve as a longtime Delaware family court judge.
John Parvensky L’79 also enrolled at the Law School to study “poverty law” and health law under Sparer. “He certainly lived a life that reinforced the need to look beyond traditional areas of law to be able to use the law to advance social justice,” Parvensky said, adding that tax policy and real estate development can have a huge impact on public interest work. “A number of us took that and continued to apply those principles in practice in our careers… . It certainly made a difference in my career direction.”
Expanding Access to Justice Through Legal Services
Sparer was the co-founder and first legal director of Mobilization for Youth in 1963. The legal unit worked on reforms through impact litigation to address unfair practices New York City juveniles faced, said Richard Weishaupt, a close friend of Sparer’s and a senior attorney at CLS in Philadelphia. “That was a big deal because initially, legal aid programs were much more focused on individual people,” he said. Sparer also founded the Columbia Center on Social Welfare Policy and Law, the country’s first legal services support center.
Rulli said Sparer’s work at Mobilization for Youth, now called Mobilization for Justice, was revolutionary. “It put theory into practice on behalf of the poor, and it was a model for legal services programs that would develop in following years around the country, certainly in Philadelphia a year later, when the Community Legal Services was granted a charter in 1964,” said Rulli, who worked alongside Weishaupt at CLS before becoming a professor at the Law School.
Sparer, his colleagues said, borrowed legal approaches from the civil rights movement to serve the interests of people living below the poverty line.
“He studied the strategies used by the NAACP and Legal Defense Fund, the ACLU, and others that litigated on behalf of minorities and freedom of speech, but there were no real advocates for the poor and the civil problems they faced,” Rulli said. Working with civil legal services lawyers across the country in that vein, he said, resulted in successful litigation at the national level.
Class Action Success at The U.S. Supreme Court
Sparer, who served as General Counsel to the National Welfare Rights Organization, was integral to a triumvirate of U.S. Supreme Court cases that shaped welfare policy. He was a mastermind behind the landmark 1970 U.S. Supreme Court case Goldberg v. Kelly, which held that people receiving public benefits had due process rights to a hearing before the government could terminate their benefits. This decision set a lasting precedent that continues to influence public interest law and the legal protections available to low-income individuals.
Judge Waserstein said Sparer’s legal argument was ingenious.
“The due process clause in the Constitution says that property cannot be taken without due process,” she said. “It was created to protect the rights of white men who could vote. What Ed Sparer did is he took that rule of law and applied it to a group of people it was not meant for. When the Framers wrote the due process clause, I don’t think they were talking about poor people.”
In the 1968 case King v. Smith, the Supreme Court ruled that women receiving public benefits could allow men to visit their homes without fear of benefits being revoked. The next year, welfare recipients celebrated another victory in Shapiro v. Thompson, which held they were allowed to travel between states or move residences without having their benefits terminated.
Weishaupt said Sparer’s successes had a lasting effect on a due process mentality in American society: They made challenges to benefit denials or unfair treatment by the government more mainstream. “Now you see it in universities and health insurance, and I think that’s one of the things that was inspired by the kind of work he did,” he said. “It inspired a lot of people.”
Lasting Impact of the Sparer Symposium
Sparer’s influence extends far beyond his lifetime. For over 40 years, Penn Carey Law students have honored his legacy by engaging with critical public interest topics at the annual
Edward V. Sparer Symposium, hosted by the Toll Public Interest Center (TPIC) every February.
As the hub for public interest law at Penn Carey Law, TPIC serves as a central resource for students committed to using their legal education to advance social justice. TPIC supports pro bono work, public interest fellowships, and career pathways for students and graduates seeking to make an impact through public service. The Sparer Symposium is one of TPIC’s signature initiatives, reinforcing the Law School’s deep commitment to public interest law.
“It’s really a way to bring in people from the Law School and from the local community, and from around the country, to look at a specific issue in the area of poverty law,” said Ayanna Williams, the Associate Director for the Toll Public Service Corps at TPIC. Topics are wide-ranging and have included protecting democracy following the 2020 election and the January 6 riots and transportation and mobility justice. The 44th Sparer Symposium, held on February 7, 2025, explored the effects of an ascendant conservative legal movement centered on originalism.
A Health Law Trailblazer
Sparer’s efforts were not limited to class action suits.
“If you just focused on litigation, you wouldn’t be telling the full story of Ed Sparer,” Rulli said. “He believed while litigation was critically important, it was only one part of a social movement, and so to be successful, you really needed to be partners with grassroots organizations and with a larger coalition to bring about meaningful change.” Sparer advocated that true change was not achieved in the courtroom, Rulli added, but in empowering people living below the poverty line.
Sparer was engrossed in the intersectionality of poverty and health law, and he began the Pennsylvania Health Law Project at the Law School, that set the stage for advocacy around Medicaid and Medicare and access to medical treatment in a way that had never been done before.
In the 1970s, Carr said, the idea of healthcare for all Americans was novel. Sparer’s creation of the project, she said, inspired models of health reform in future decades. “Over these last 40 years, Hillary Clinton attempted to do universal healthcare insurance, and we had Obamacare — I think Ed’s work and the people he worked with can be credited for the birth of that whole movement.”
Before his death, Sparer announced that his Pennsylvania Health Law Project at the Law School would be ending, but he expressed hope that others would continue the fight for healthcare access for those in need. Inspired by his work, Ann Torregrossa and her co-founders later established a separate organization under the same name—the Pennsylvania Health Law Project—as a public interest law firm.
Torregrossa said Sparer’s community outreach work, combined with impact litigation, provided a national model for addressing poverty law. “It really impacted the accessibility and the way public interest law was practiced across the country,” she said. Sparer modeled providing legal services to people at a grassroots level by providing those services in lower-income neighborhoods instead of downtown.”
Torregrossa and her colleagues deliberately retained the name as a tribute to Sparer’s pioneering contributions, ensuring that his legacy would live on through their advocacy efforts.
“He believed providing legal service in low-income communities was the only way to really get to know people and issues impacting them,” she continued, “while at the same time looking at patterns and finding ways to address those patterns of injustice. … That was amazing.”
Though not widely known outside legal circles, Sparer’s work transformed public interest law, influencing policies and shaping the careers of countless advocates. His legacy endures in the students he inspired and the legal victories that continue to protect the rights of those in poverty.
Carr and Rulli, who teach public interest-related courses at Penn Carey Law and have also taught together, like to begin the semester with an inspirational reading from Sparer’s writings.
“Caring about your fellow human being is what this is all about — it’s what Ed Sparer was about, and what the law should be about,” Rulli said. “Too often the law fails, but it is social and public interest lawyers like Ed Sparer who keep the fight going and give us hope that there’s a better future ahead.”
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