One day last September, a curious email arrived in Chris Hables Gray’s inbox. An author and self-described anarchist, feminist, and revolutionary, Gray fits right into Santa Cruz, Calif., where he lives. He’s written extensively about genetic engineering and the inevitable rise of cyborgs, attending protests in between for causes such as Black Lives Matter.While Gray had taken some consulting gigs over the years, he’d never received an offer like this one. The first shock was the money: significantly more than he’d earned from all but one of his books. The second was the task: researching the aesthetics of seminal works of science fiction such as Blade Runner. The biggest surprise, however, was the ultimate client: Mohammed bin Salman, the 36-year-old crown prince of Saudi Arabia.

But, of the dozens of female lawyers and law graduates I spoke with on a visit to Saudi Arabia in early November, only two would admit to any interest in expanding rights for Saudi women.

On Salman’s third day as king, he oversaw his first beheading, of an alleged rapist. By early November, the kingdom had already carried out more executions—at least a hundred and fifty—than it had in any year since 1995. In late November, two Saudi newspapers reported that the state would soon be executing at least fifty more prisoners, all convicted of terrorism, which under Saudi law includes such offenses as damaging the reputation of Saudi Arabia or its king; a charge of terrorism is frequently used to try not only jihadists but also bloggers and lawyers.

Today, several thousand Saudi women hold law degrees, and sixty-seven are licensed to practice, according to justice-ministry figures released at the end of November.

In early October, at the end of the Islamic calendar year, the Saudi justice ministry announced that in the past twelve months there had been a forty-eight-per-cent increase in cases of khula, divorces initiated by women.

The second Hawa’a’s Rights lecture, on April 26th, addressed personal-status law, the category of Saudi law that governs marriage, divorce, guardianship, and inheritance.

The first lecture in the series, which Ferak called Hawa’a’s Rights (Hawa’a is the Arabic version of the name Eve), was publicized on Twitter and took place on the evening of April 15th.

In November, in an adultery case, a married woman was sentenced to death by stoning; her unmarried male partner received a hundred lashes.

The fact that women couldn’t obtain law licenses wasn’t a source of anxiety for Zahran and her classmates, but by 2008, when she graduated, the justice ministry still hadn’t indicated that it would begin licensing female lawyers.

In 2004, she was a student in the human-resources department at King Abdulaziz University, in Jeddah, when the university announced that it would be opening a degree program in law for female students. It was the first such program in the kingdom, and Zahran immediately switched her concentration to law.

The advent, in 2014, of car services that can be requested through mobile apps has given women a freedom of movement that had seemed impossible just months earlier.

Sorcery is considered such a grave concern that, in 2009, the Commission for the Promotion of Virtue and the Prevention of Vice created a specially trained unit to conduct witchcraft investigations.

In 2008, King Abdullah, who died last January, appalled some of his subjects when he announced that the Riyadh University for Women would be renamed Princess Nora bint Abdul Rahman University, in memory of a favorite aunt.

In supermarkets, which have employed women since 2013, low partitions suffice, because semi-public spaces are easily monitored by members of the Committee for the Promotion of Virtue and the Prevention of Vice, the kingdom’s religious police.

In 2011, when Mohra Ferak entered the law department at Dar Al-Hekma, her immediate family was supportive, but others were horrified.

Since 2013, women have been allowed to ride bicycles, but only in designated parks and recreation areas, chaperoned by a close male relative.

2004, Saudi Arabia introduced reforms allowing women’s colleges and universities to offer degree programs in law.

The lecturer, Bayan Mahmoud Zahran—a thirty-year-old Jeddah attorney who, in January, 2014, became the first Saudi woman to open a law firm

In 2013, law licenses were granted to four women, including Bayan Mahmoud Zahran.

The first female law students graduated in 2008, but, for several years after that, they were prohibited from appearing in court.