Poor enforcement of international intellectual property law in non-Western countries is typically blamed on national-level institutional, political, and cultural contexts. However, there are other factors at play, producing uneven efficacy of transplanted laws within a nation. Greyscale Legality analyzes how and why legal transplants survive, perish, or thrive beyond their original contexts by critically examining the application of international IP law across six industries in China. Drawing on extensive fieldwork in areas such as biomedicine, telecom equipment, and film and television, Qiaoling He investigates how legal texts and industry-specific contexts interact to shape widely differing degrees of IP enforcement within the same nation. She argues that laws, as drafted, function on a greyscale of interpretive and operative ambiguity within the industries where they are applied. National settings may not always be supportive for IP law transplants in reducing such ambiguity, but certain industry-specific directives, such as product standardization and network structure, can compensate. Greyscale Legality astutely uses Chinese case studies to identify mechanisms that shape the outcomes of global-local encounters, and to develop a theoretical framework that can be applied to other developing countries and other legal areas. Contextual elements can facilitate enforcement by bringing legal texts a more focused interpretation, alleviating legal greyness and generating pockets of legal effectiveness.