This paper examines Ottoman engagement with the formal field of international law during the last four decades of the empire. After the Congress of Berlin, the Ottoman Empire worked on several fronts to establish its membership in the community of European powers. In some ways, Ottoman law resembled from certain other marks of sovereignty brandished by the Hamidian empire: it was a performance meant to convince an external audience and forestall internal opposition. Ottoman legal reform was not merely a show, however, because it depended on the steady generation on positive content. One of the accouterments of legitimacy required to meet the international “standard of civilization” was a cadre of experts in international law. Like many other non-European powers, the Ottomans recruited European-trained lawyers to consult on their international legal work. The papers of these legal advisors, which are preserved in the Ottoman archives, are one source for this study. Another source is the activity of these lawyers in the fledgling field of international law, in particular through the Institut du Droit International and through legal publishing. Because Ottoman international law was performed above all for a foreign rather than a domestic audience, the empire’s lawyers did not seek to legitimize their activity in terms of Ottoman or Islamic legal traditions in the first instance. As they explored the resources available to them for implementation, rather than mere legislation, the lawyers made consistent use of these non-European traditions. The emerging global history of international law (Anghie 2005, Benton 2010, Fassbender and Peters 2013, Becker Lorca 2013) wrestles mightily with the question of international law’s Eurocentrism. This paper seeks to offer fresh resources in this debate, arguing that late Ottoman international lawyers were both followers and leaders in the emerging field of international law. In the late nineteenth century, international law was an experimental discipline. Ottoman legal work, undertaken to manage and bolster its membership in the community of powers, tracked a moving target. Critically, I argue that Ottoman legal questions were by no means peripheral in the development of the discipline as a whole. The models of international law that the Ottomans had to imitate in order to establish their legitimacy were being formed by Ottoman practice itself.