I ask: ‘What do an anarchist, a mulla and a Taoist, have in common? Let us see’, I tell myself, bringing to mind the stories that I am about to narrate below. I continue: ‘. . . all three tell us about being before the law . . .’ and I recall: ‘. . . all three fi nd a way to pass through the law and its various guises (magistrates and mayors, customs and immigration offi cers)’. The importance of these stories, as we shall see, lies in what they convey about law and its relation to life. These three vignettes allow us to see some of the operations of the juridical order, its ability to order life forcefully, how we fail to render the juridical order inoperative but also, and more importantly (and this may sound like a paradox), how we go on to explore parallel lives to the ones that the juridical order organises. This chapter sees these particular encounters at the borderline as exchanges with law that reveal to us that our existence may not necessarily need to be verifi ed or recognised by law. Life, our life, may exceed the borders of law. This may of course only be seen, understood, or even imagined, if we begin to see the law not as the means and the end to our existence but rather as a prop and, while we may not be able to wish its existence away, we are certainly able to tease the form of life that the juridical order ossifi es at the back or on the side of our focus in the world.