ABSTRACT
This chapter introduces three legal issue areas rife with quasi-legal controversies, and establishes some specific cases. After a brief introduction to law, power, and repression in the period of inquiry (2007-2011), the chapter explores the topics of election registration, anti-extremism, and copyrights in turn, with particular emphasis on controversial cases and the legal provisions actually utilized in them. These case studies should preferably be read as examples of selective law enforcement. Even if specific provisions come and go, the underlying logics of weak laws are presumably similar to that of other laws, other times, and other countries. The key complaint of interviewees that find themselves politically prosecuted is not that they are innocent of the violations they have been accused of. More pervasively, they focus their criticism on what they see as double standards and not least the weak laws that make the prosecution possible. The context rich analysis shows that quasi-legality can be anchored in legal documents in quite different ways.
