Platonic legislation has its origins in the Athenian law-court in which Socrates was condemned to death, in 399 bce. A young Plato was present at his trial. The injustice of the judgement against Socrates, which was handed down by some 500 citizen-judges at the conclusion of a procedurally valid trial, deepened Plato’s hostility to the democratic law-state at Athens. Yet Plato neither disavows the idea of a law-state, nor begins to act as a partisan of Greece’s archaic, non-democratic law-states (such as Crete and Sparta). Rather, he begins to forge a new legal-philosophical genre, which I will call ‘hypothetical legislation’. In this chapter, I detect the first promise of Plato’s colossal, hypothetical law-codes—the Republic and Laws—in a neglected comment that appears in his one of his earliest dialogues, the Apology. ‘If you had a law …’, Socrates says to his judges. This is the conditional mood in which all Platonic legislation will be written.