This paper argues that law and humanities scholarship as well as socio-legal studies can benefit tremendously by rethinking systematically the modes of expression of law. The force of law passes through a wide variety of media – to name only a few: spoken or written words, gestures, visual images, technical objects, human bodies. Intuitively, we may sense that each of these different sorts of mediators has some effect on the nature of the legality or normative force that it conducts and makes pass. The jurisprudential temptation is to reduce these media out of existence and to theorize, for instance, the essence of legal form apart from the substances that give it reality and materiality. The paper sketches the outlines of an anti-jurisprudence that shifts the focus to those forgotten but undeniable substances, asking how they inflect the force of law differently in each case. The paper’s most important resources are the concept of mediation in Bruno Latour’s actor-network theory and the theory of stratification worked out in the mid-20th century by Danish linguist Louis Hjelmslev, which offers a diagram of expression that can be converted for legal-theoretical application. The upshot of this reflection on the force of law, legal stratification, and the vincula juris through which law passes is that we are obliged to take seriously the media of law’s expression: it is there that law makes society and is itself made.