he ‘Bare Act’ is an expression used to specify the content of law, bereft of any interpretative gloss. In a legal library in India and many parts of the Englishspeaking world, a Bare Act is a document that simply codifies a law without annotation or commentary. The ‘Bare Act’ is legality pared down to its textual essence. It expresses only what the law does, and what it can do. The enactment of law, however, is less a matter of reading the letter of the law, and more a matter of augmenting or eroding its textual foundation through the acts of interpretation, negotiation, disputation and witnessing. The law, and practices within and outside it, stand in relation to a meta-legal domain that can be said to embrace acts and actions in all their depth, intensity and substantive generality.