Drawing on Kafka’s The Trial and its parable “Before the Law,” this chapter explores the tragic paradox of law and justice. Kafka’s Josef K. dramatizes the impossibility of entering the law, revealing how legality traps individuals in guilt, delay, and deferral. Law here is inseparable from inwardness: the singular, personal confrontation with justice that cannot be codified or universally applied. Philosophy and theology echo this insight, as existential guilt and original sin expose the limits of legal rationality. The chapter develops a “poetics of inwardness,” where imagination, conscience, and love resist abstraction and technical procedure. Law’s aporia—the impossibility of fully coinciding with justice—marks it as inherently tragic. Yet this tragedy also opens the possibility of renewal: imagination, literature, and inwardness can reanimate legal thought, reconnecting it with the human search for meaning, responsibility, and reconciliation beyond the frozen abstractions of rationalist jurisprudence.