The volume’s Introduction is divided into four parts. It begins by setting out the analytical framework animating this volume, namely “juristocratic reckoning," which builds on, yet critically modifies and reappropriates, Ran Hirschl’s (2004) notion of “juristocracy” in order to capture a broader process of transformation through which law and legal categories are invested with unusual weight and responsibility beyond their more conventional carrying capacity. Such over-freighting of law typically involves a “dialectics of reckoning,” through which law is first elevated during certain moments in time, which then give way to a second phase, a coming to terms with juristocracy’s failures marked by critique, skepticism, and eventual disenchantment. Within this larger dynamic, certain histories of juristocratic reckoning are imbued with what the Introduction describes as an “iconic indexicality,” in which their supposed historical significance itself enters into the process of juristocratic elevation and then unraveling. Against the backdrop of this conceptual exposition, the Introduction situates Reckoning with Law in Excess in the current conjuncture – an era of crisis and confrontation, characterized by growing debates, within academia and beyond, about the demise of the rule of law. Having located the overall analytical project within different historical, political, and academic contexts, the Introduction then traces the contours of juristocratic reckoning through the diverse and global range of case studies assembled in the volume, including some that are marked by an iconic indexicality and others that are not. It proposes three “taxonomies of reckoning,” which coalesce around concerns with “states of juristocracy,” “alter-legal reckonings,” as well as “juristocracies against the state,” attesting to the persisting centrality – if always contested, variable, and fragmented – of the state form. Last but not least, the Introduction examines the temporality of juristocracy, since viewing the case studies through their various temporalities reinforces the wider point that dialectics of reckoning must be understood through their empirical and historical heterogeneities rather than as exemplars of an abstracted sociolegal category. Revisiting the various case studies, the Introduction shows how the dialectics of juristocratic reckoning are associated with moments, momentums, and mobilizations in the living archives of law that often yield inconclusive or ambiguous results and remain open to multiple interpretations, directions, and futures.