There is a strange ambivalence to law: law is a language of power, but law, standing apart from power, also tempers its excesses. We live in a world where the powerful wield law as a weapon, but then hurriedly seek to justify the lawfulness of their actions through their citation of laws and legal principles. In their doing so, we see the potential of law to contain power, provide redress, and to expose the workings of arbitrary power. Taking law’s ambivalent relationship to power as our point of departure, this course introduces students to the field of law and society, particularly in its more critical modes, through a series of debates over law’s relationship to morality, the place of law in everyday life, the rule of law and authoritarianism, and the lives of law and its subjects in imperial contexts. In this series of dialogues, we will focus on the poetics and technologies of law, and the ways it transforms the grounds upon which we engage with power. The aim throughout is to chart the workings of law and power across registers of meaning, and to locate moments when law’s subjects may spring beyond their limits.