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Andrea Kalasountas, a 3L at IU McKinney, wrote a paper for Professor Fran Quigley’s Health and Human Rights course during the fall 2022 semester. Nothing unusual there. The piece also fulfilled her advanced writing requirement. Again, something law students do all the time before completing their legal education.

Kalasountas’s paper shines in that it was selected for presentation at the upcoming Poverty Law Conference at Berkeley Law, slated for March. The event, “Poverty Law: Where Do We Go from Here?” will focus on the evolving nature of society’s concern for the poor, on changes to the nation’s antipoverty programs, and on the future of poverty law as a field. Her paper, “Ending the Multibillionaire: A Solution to Poverty and Violations of the Right to Health,” was chosen for presentation during the March 10 and 11 conference.

“There is a rampant health crisis facing the American people; that health crisis is poverty,” the abstract reads. “As of April 2021, the combined wealth of America's billionaires was nearly double that of the combined wealth of the bottom half of Americans-- $4.56 trillion vs. $2.62 trillion. We live in a country where some people live with more money than they could spend in a lifetime, while others die unable to pay for their basic needs. Accordingly, this paper calls for the end of the multi-billionaire. Under a public nuisance theory, this paper will show that poverty is a public health crisis, proximately caused by the multi-billionaires' intentional exploitation, contribution, and perpetuation of an unjust system, resulting in the unnecessary and avoidable deaths of millions of Americans. Consequently, this paper will explore the problem, walk through the argument, and conclude by showing the real and immediate results of a successful public nuisance argument and the end of the multi-billionaire.”