Each of the contributions to this book addresses the question of how legal techniques fabricate persons and things. In exploring that question, and in asking just what ‘fabrication’ means, each chapter focuses on a specific historical, social, or ethnographic context. Given that these contexts, and the modes of institutional or ritual action which they disclose, are quite varied, this book does not aim to provide a general theoretical account of the fabrication of persons and things in law. Indeed, the term ‘fabrication’ is chosen precisely because it suggests modes of action which are lodged in rich, culturally-specific, layers of texts, practices, instruments, technical devices, aesthetic forms, stylised gestures, semantic artefacts, and bodily dispositions. Each contribution shows how, in a given social, historical, or ethnographic context, elements of this repertoire are mobilised by legal techniques of personification and reification. The specific character of these modes of action would be lost in a general theory of law as an agent of ‘social construction’. Yet, diverse as they may be, our approaches to the question of legal fabrication are brought together as resources for reflection upon a specific institutional predicament. In Western legal systems, persons and things are now problems rather than presuppositions. One could point to technology, and biotechnology in particular, as the main factor here, but there are other reasons for the implosion of the old legal division between persons and things.