This chapter draws on a year of fieldwork with housing activists in Berlin to examine law as a cultural archive of putatively long-defunct utopian visions, and at once as the key for resurrecting these visions in the present. In the German elections of September 2021 a referendum for expropriating hundreds of thousands of apartments owned by real-estate multinationals in the federal state of Berlin won by a resounding majority, to the surprise of both supporters and detractors. The inclusion of the referendum on the Berlin ballot represented the successful culmination of several years of intensive organizing and campaigning by a grassroots movement facing a largely uncooperative and antagonistic government led by the Social Democrats. The movement based its campaign on an article in the German constitution that grants federal as well as state governments the power to “socialize” private property on a massive scale. Included in the 1949 constitution with the support not only of the Social Democrats who now oppose it but also of many conservatives, the article reflects a bygone time when competing visions of how best to structure Germany’s economy had not yet reached a political resolution, when ideas about the supremacy of public over private interests held sway over broad constituencies, and when aspirations for the collective ownership of the means of production were central to working-class discourses. Notably for how these struggles panned out, this article has never been used in the history of the Federal Republic. The chapter examines how contemporary housing activists seek to reanimate such past futurities through their legal afterlives, locating in the law the potential for a radical change that in contrast with the largely ineffective impact of existing rent regulations and city ordinances would fundamentally transform the nature of the real-estate market from the ground up. The chapter argues that far from naively staking their hopes on law, these activists elaborate creative strategies for reckoning with the limits that an antagonistic political conjuncture as well as enduring hegemonic ideologies about the market place upon it.