This major collection, with a masterful introduction by the editors, presents new ways to understand how the globalized legal order bears the signs of its colonial heritage while providing a hyperlegal space for new negotiations about order, crime and justice in many postcolonial societies. It offers a feast of empirical insights that bring the anthropology of legality into the very center of postcolonial studies, places the South African experience in a highly original perspective, and shows that the relationship between law and legality is both contradictory and generative.