The Arab uprisings have put mass demonstrations back on the map in the region, but the reality is that in many states, the right to assemble and express political dissent has long been codified in the constitution, even if the rulers sound to constrain them in practice. Scholarly attention has largely examined the protests themselves, examining arrests and prosecutions with little substantive examination of the ways in which regimes use “law” as a mechanism of governance. That is, scholars might focus on what a law does or does not permit—for example, in Jordan a citizen can criticize the government but not the monarch—without attention to the ways in which “law” as an elevated norm of order is itself used by regimes to make certain kinds of politics possible. In recent years, regimes have adapted and adopted U.S. anti-terrorist legislation, creating new possibilities for repression within the confines of what “law” permits. In this paper, I will use insights from critical legal studies that examine law through the perspective of new materialism, an approach that examines “non-human” practices, processes, and objects as exercising agency in ways that profoundly affect what is possible in the realm of dissent. The scholar becomes implicated in this process, particularly when she reproduces the fiction that law is comprised of sets of rules that merely enable or constrain behavior (of humans, who alone possess agency). I will focus on the case of Jordan, examining not merely the series of laws affecting the “right” to express political dissent publically, but I will also show how many scholarly studies of law, particularly in the field of political science, work to advance the repressive power of these regimes even as they (scholars) intend to advance critiques.