This paper examines everyday contestations and negotiations in the field of law during the civil war in South Sudan, amid violence and profound uncertainty. It is based on ethnographic and action research, and court documentation gathered between 2014 and 2017. The law continued to function in this period as an instrument of repression, extraction and contestation alongside military battles and mass atrocities. Military-political elites employed the law to target their opponents and to seize economic assets. Many chiefs, and a few judges, continued to hold courts. Meanwhile, people at the margins brought accusations and disputes to the courts, and lawyers and paralegals struggled to assist them, responding to cases of arbitrary detention, threats to land rights, and routine injustices in statutory and customary courts. The paper traces these encounters, focusing on two cases, and argues that while they constitute only marginal, temporary gains in terms of justice, their endeavours matter politically. Legal activists reckoned with a military ‘kleptocracy’ (de Waal 2014) that was schooled in Sudan’s system of ‘lawfare’ (Massoud 2013) in efforts to broker the survival of citizens and communities. They relied upon a hybrid legal consciousness, extensive social networks and an eclectic blend of resources associated with both customary law and human rights education. The cases reveal the logics of political authority and the narrow potential for civic agency in South Sudan. But they also suggest an incremental process of everyday law-making ‘from below’ that is in tension with the dominant militarized practices of government.