With the inauguration of the Mandate rule, the British hoped to advance changes that would help constitute "the rule of law"; uproot local despotism and promote equity and justice for all. The legal sphere was, therefore, a main "battleground" for this purpose, while law was perceived by many British bureaucrats as a central tool to achieve social change. This lecture will concentrate on the legal sphere and on criminal law in particular, analyzing the ways in which colonial subjects confronted their changing environment with the move from the Ottoman to the British rule. The main focus will be attributed to criminal intent, scrutinizing the ways in which different legal players imbued it with different meanings and understanding. In stark contrast with the Shar‘i law, which played a pivotal role in the lives of Muslim local residents in Palestine prior to the British occupation, and in which intent was used only as a mechanism to deliberate the severity of punishment after a person was found guilty, intent was the main theme in criminal trials under the Mandate. This was part and parcel of the British understanding of criminal law, where intent was used as the most important element to prove the existence of mens rea, or in its English translation "the guilty mind" of an accused person. Under the context of transition, I put the spotlight on the Arab lawyer ‘Awni ‘Abd al-Hadi and the ways he sought to approach the tensions rising in trials deliberated under the supervision of English bureaucrats inclined to judge according to the rationale of the Common Law. I will use the court records of the murder of Solomon Rubin (a Jew murdered by three Arabs in Jerusalem on November 2, 1921 – the fourth anniversary of the Balfour Declaration) as a case study, analyzing the unique and linguistically-anchored understanding ‘Abd al-Hadi gives to criminal intent in his defense of the accused. While this was an integral part of his attempt to win the case for his client, it was also his way to negotiate the meaning and translation of legal concepts into the colonial setting of Mandate Palestine, adapting British legal concepts into the legal culture of local residents.