Legal Profession Commons^™

This Article argues that at the turn of the twentieth century, settlement houses were particularly important and vibrant legal sites, in which women settlement workers played groundbreaking and multiple legal roles.' Settlement houses created a geographical and intellectual space where diverse parties participated in analyzing, examining, discussing, popularizing, producing, and reforming law. More broadly, settlement houses were part of a rich and prolific urban legal environment that produced and prompted legal innovation and experimentation. Surprisingly, however, legal scholars have almost entirely neglected the groundbreaking legal work that settlement houses performed. Such neglect results in an impoverished understanding of fin-de-siecle legal …