Professor Hammond will present his paper entitled, On
Fires, Floods, and Federalism: Adapting Welfare Programs for the
Climate Crisis. Professor Hammond’s research contextualizes
the climate crisis in our scholarly understanding of the American
welfare state. Professor Hammond will explain how, amid the
recent spate of fires and floods, federal law has fared. His work
attends to the role of Congress, weakened as it is by increased
polarization and diminished capacity, and how the resulting
delays and distortions in emergency relief have hampered the
government response.