Richard Elliot Blum
Revson Fellow 2000-2001
Staff Attorney
The Legal Aid Society
Richard Blum is a Staff Attorney for the Legal Aid Society, where he has served for nearly a decade in the Civil Appeals and Law Reform Unit, and the Bronx Neighborhood Office. Born in Newark, New Jersey, he holds a B.A. in Philosophy from Yale and a J.D. from New York University.
Countering the detrimental policies of welfare reform in New York City, Mr. Blum has litigated groundbreaking legal cases defending the rights of welfare recipients and New York’s poor, including a set of cases that obtained injunctions in federal and state courts against further staffing cuts at the City’s welfare centers until the City could demonstrate that its cutbacks would not cause the illegal deprivation of benefits to needy clients. He has also helped generate class action lawsuits to challenge the City’s policies of assigning all parents on public assistance to workfare instead of allowing access to education and training, as well as suits that have challenged the City’s practice of valuing workfare wages at minimum wage level.
A longtime advocate for anti-poverty legislation, Mr. Blum developed analyses of the federal welfare law to demonstrate why New York did not have to accept punitive welfare reform proposals. He has fought City attempts to expel homeless shelter residents for violating bureaucratic requirements of the welfare system, and has provided legislative and strategic legal counsel to organizations including the Welfare Rights Initiative, an organizing project for students on welfare at CUNY, where he is a member of the advisory board.
At Columbia, Mr. Blum plans to study the historical struggles that have shaped debates over welfare reform, and gain a deeper understanding of immigration and labor migration in the United States.
(The Revson Fellow’s biography that appears above was last updated in 2000. Revson Fellows may update their biographies on this site by sending email to: revson@columbia.edu)
The Revson experience is as rejuvenating as it is enriching. It widens our individual networks considerably and allows each of us the opportunity to be both a teacher and a learner. For many of us, the Program restores balance in our lives and renews our sense of commitment for the long haul.
