Much has been made of the Agambenian framework of exception and the regime of legal suspension it establishes. This paper ethnographically examines the hard work that is required to produce legal suspension within the parameters of the law by looking at the practice of property restitution of transitional institutions in post-war Kosovo. Kosovo's 'black hole state' reveals how the legal bureaucracies established to usher in human rights serve to perpetuate the state of suspension rather than realising their utopian goals.