ABSTRACT
Drawing on British ideas, Addams saw settlement houses as a "solution of the social and industrial problems which are engendered by the modern conditions of life in a great city". Despite the attempts of critics to sideline or banish poverty law from the law school, the subject haunts legal thought and practice. People will return to the concept of "being with" the poor, and to Jane Addams's work in order to find an "origin" for poverty law as the broken middle, located precariously between law and social justice. The radical sensibility is created in this "in between" where convention is "intersected" by the question of how best to act. In Jane Addams's social ethics this was the token of a proper maladjustment. The broken middle will provide an articulation of an anxiety that finds its authentic expression in ethical praxis.
