Framing the volume, this chapter introduces the notion of legal entanglements and lays out implications for our understanding of law and its dynamics. Entanglements – relations between norms from different origins that are neither integrated nor fully separated – are a core feature of the contemporary law beyond the state, and have been characteristic of law for much of its history, but they have long been neglected by legal scholars and theorists conceiving of the law through the prism of legal systems. This chapter traces the origins of the concept, manifestations and forms of entanglement, the dynamics behind them, as well as the consequences for the stability of political and social order. It also uses these engagements to introduce the different contributions to the volume and highlight the different ways in which they reconstruct and assess entanglement and its challenges.