Why translate two of Leibniz’s first academic writings, the works of a young university student? The most obvious answer is: because this young student was Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz. But there are also other, less obvious reasons. The most important of these reasons is the genuine intellectual interest these writings elicit, and in particular the freshness and originality of Leibniz’s reflections on what we have called “legal puzzles.” These fall under a range of legal issues to which Leibniz in these two short works applies his logical skills (still developing but already considerable, given his amazing precocity). There are puzzles resulting from cases of apparent conflict between law and philosophy (the latter broadly understood to comprise not only metaphysics but also mathematics, the empirical sciences, and theology). These puzzles sometimes arise from the fact that the same terms are used in different ways in philosophy and in law. Other times the puzzles arise from the fact that a certain principle is assumed to have universal application, while its use is only justified under particular pragmatic conditions, or from the fact that lawyers and jurists work within a defective conceptual framework. Some puzzles result not from an apparent conflict between law and philosophy but from the need to provide a deeper logical analysis of a conceptual issue. And finally there are cases which provide proper legal puzzles, i.e., those cases whose solution is doubtful because of the convoluted logical form of dispositions (expressions of intent) or because of a conflicting priority relationship. In addressing all these different kinds of puzzles, Leibniz always dissects the problem with the greatest clarity, disentangling its different aspects, and then proposes solutions, always reasonable and sometimes surprising. And he does not refrain from peppering his intellectual acrobatics with some humorous comments.