In Jordan, w?s?a is considered both a pervasive form of corruption, and an ordinary practice of interpersonal care, and a key modality for social and political ascendancy. On the one hand, Jordanians complain that w?s?a causes social injustice by undermining the rule of law, and giving unequal access to benefits and public resources to citizens who are, in principle, equal. On the other hand, even those who condemn w?s?a as a form of corruption and injustice, seek it to redress existing injustices. Similarly, despite its criminalization since 2006, there is a legal ambivalence around when w?s?a is to be considered a form of corruption, and when it is an ordinary social practice that does not constitute a criminal offense. This paper takes these moral ambivalences around w?s?a to revisit dominant understandings of social justice, both among Jordanians, and in social scientific literature. In this view relations of patronage and patrimonial authority are pitted against relations of citizenship and rational-legal authority, and the two are project as a teleological move into modernity, progress, and development. In this framework, w?s?a can signal anything from incomplete modernization, a modality of political domination, or an impediment to development. By contrast, I argue that moral and legal ambivalences around the practice of w?s?a are better understood as a structural contradiction within the rule of law itself, and its promise of equality. I develop my argument by way of ethnographic accounts several sites of political patronage, among members of parliament, the Royal Court, and the state bureaucracy, as well legal debates around the criminalization of the practice.