This book of essays responds to the intersection of two failures, in the hope that approaches with the promise to address one of these failures may also have promise in addressing the other. The first failure is the dismal inability of American urban policy, over at least the past half century, to significantly improve the lot of the low-income populations that are concentrated in pockets of most American cities. The second failure is the increasingly recognized inability of the American legal academy to find models of legal scholarship that achieve relevance for audiences that can have real impact on real problems.