July 9, 2005. Thousands of residents from the sweltering, dilapidated camps that surround Khartoum streamed into the city. So many poverty-stricken and war-weary Sudanese filled the streets that the city shut down. I remember seeing broad smiles and hopeful eyes. Beneath the smiles, one could still sense hunger and trepidation. But this was a day for rejoicing. After more than twenty-two years, southern Sudanese leaders were officially welcomed back to the capital city and into government. The civil war was finally over. My family had fled Sudan when I was a boy in 1983, as war resumed after a decade of relative calm. I returned to Sudan for the first time in 2005 to spend the summer with the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) as a graduate student from Berkeley. I hoped to learn more about my homeland and the people who had stayed behind. I also wanted to make better sense of the concept and functions of law – and lawlessness. I hoped that investigating the law in as little-studied and unstable a setting as Sudan would reveal insights into the basis of the law’s instrumental and ideological malleability. I knew I was lucky to have been spared the devastation of war in the intervening decades until my return to Sudan. But I had no conception of the true price paid by the Sudanese people during periods of violence and repression.