as well as when they are faced with questions of morality. The context of this study is a specific one: that of public prosecutors’ offices and courts of justice in Egypt, as well as the cases brought before them in the past ten to fifteen years. The intention, however, is neither to present the Egyptian legal system nor to take that system as a case study of a larger entity – which some might call “Islamic law”. It is even less to postulate any form of Arab or Muslim cultural specificity. On the contrary, this book’s goal is to observe the contextualized deployment of various practices, and the activities of very diverse people who, in different capacities, found themselves involved in or faced with institutional judicial space. More specifically, the objective is to observe and describe, in an empirically documented and detailed manner, the moral dimension of judicial activity, and the judicial approach to questions of morality. In other words, the point is to detail the production and manifestation of judicial activity in its necessarily moral dimension, and to examine how that activity mediates and modulates the treatment of cases dealing with sexual morality, among others. To state that this is a study of law in context and action clearly specifies the perspective within which the work is situated. Inspired by the later Wittgenstein and aligned with ethnomethodology and conversation analysis, this perspective may be described as praxeological. In the following chapters, there will be abundant reference to works of ethnomethodology and conversation analysis, in general, and to the analysis undertaken by some of these works of legal and judicial objects, in particular. This introduction will be restricted to a general presentation of the ethnomethodological way to proceed and a few of its fundamental axes: the respecification of sociological objects; the attention paid to the practical grammar of actions, notably acts of language; the rejection of sociological irony and overhanging stance vis-à-vis the people and the actions they undertake. Having posited these basics, it will be possible to sketch out the general lines followed in the book.