In Chapter 6, the ethnographic core of the book culminates in an attempt to gain further purchase on justice’s unfinished, out-of-reach quality. The chapter centres on a criminal case heard in a magistrates’ court when a brother stood accused of publicly insulting his sister and making reference to her HIV-positive status. Analysis of the case focuses on how existing legal resources were brought to bear upon novel situations and new moral categories within the context of a dispute between members of a matrilineal family with differing views on the disposal of lineage land. In handling the case, the magistrate drew upon dominant ideas about stigma, which served to obscure the gendered and relational context of the dispute. By contrast, HIV-positive women’s narrative accounts of their experiences are suffused with references to complex and unfinished relationships. Significantly, their narratives also contain tentative expressions of hope for the future, which echo the prospective temporality of efforts to bring about justice through legal forums, thus illustrating the experiential proximity of justice and hope. However, as the case study demonstrates, the administration of law forecloses justice’s forward momentum.