ABSTRACT
The poverty lawyer lives the frustrations of a personal politics enabled and limited by the professional form of life s/he has chosen. Poverty law is an exercise in the self-making of the lawyer. Indeed, West and Smiley have called for a democratic revolution against poverty. It may even be that in seizing the problem of poverty, critical legal theory becomes part of this new movement. The chapter addresses radical constitutionalism; a reappraisal of themes linked to welfare rights and filtered through progressive constitutionalism. Critical legal theory is perhaps "founded" in the equally powerful and fragile sense of vertiginous opening. Perhaps it is the moment when the darkness of the midnight fiction begins to lose its hold, but this already sounds too much like a Nietzschean metaphor of dawn light. In the words of Ellison's Invisible Man, confronting the colour line is a necessity in order to go on living.
