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This lecture will take place online. Registration is required, click through for the registration link. Zoom information will be provided via confirmation email to registered participants. This lecture sets up the basic framework for the series, and its broad line of argument. Most of the existing historiography tends to assume that the bigger the gap between written norms and legal practice, the more irrelevant the norms must have been. Such gaps, however, could be productive in their own right. Once law is understood as a starting-point for the construction of scenarios, rather than dictating outcomes, one can start to see why the most useful laws might not necessarily always have been the ones that came closest to the practical solutions eventually reached.