In Kenya, struggles for land drove the quest for independence and the land question has been been at the heart of the public debate for more than half a century. In popular imagination as well as in national politics, land is closely associated to (in)justice and (il)legality. At a more ordinary level, citizens usually experience land issues through disputes taking place at different scales, and through which they encounter legal bureaucracies. In this paper, I look at these encounters through case studies of land disputes in the city of Eldoret, which is located in Kenya's Rift Valley. Based on a year of ethnographic field research, this study explores the ways in which the law is mobilised to legitimise land rights, how it competes with other repertoires, and what it tells us about the state-citizens relations.