In the sixteenth-century Ottoman Empire, a combination of Sunni piety and fiscal exigency led Şeyh ül-Islam Ebussuud Efendi to proclaim that he had reconciled the Ottoman kanun with sharia. As Colin Imber has shown, Ebussuud claimed an important legislative role for Sultan Suleyman by virtue of his claim to the caliphate. However, Imber and other scholars generally believe that the importance of kanun as a legal genre thereafter declined, and that Suleyman’s successors in the office of sultan did not perpetuate his claims of extensive legislative authority. One frequently cited reason for these developments is that the dynasty increasingly sought to project an image of orthodox Sunni piety, and that promulgating kanun was not consistent with an orthodox Sunni sensibility. My paper maintains that many of Suleyman’s successors claimed equal or even greater authority as legislators, and surprisingly, a number of jurists supported and facilitated their claims. Previous scholarship has shown that the Ottomans debated whether the kanun was a law that should be preserved as it had been set down by previous sultans, or whether the reigning sultan had the authority to change it. My research shows that a number of post-Suleyman sultans (and bureaucrats who served them) maintained that the sultan had the latter authority, at least where the land tenure law was concerned. A number of high-ranking jurists within the ilmiye supported this claim, as did some prominent jurists in the provinces. Rather than seeing the sultan’s legal powers as a threat to the practice of orthodox jurisprudence, these jurists extended the authority of the kanun by finding theoretical justifications for integrating land tenure kanun more coherently into the body of Hanafi fiqh. By integrating the sultan’s law into their fetvas, the jurists created an expectation that the sultan’s law was to be enforced by the ulema as vigilantly as the law they learned from books of fiqh. The paper supports the position that the Sunnism (and Hanifism) that the Ottomans practiced in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries was increasingly penetrable to the temporal power of the sultan. The Islamic law that was practiced in the empire in these centuries built an increasingly institutionalized space for the sultan as legislator, creating a bridge with legal reform of the 19th century. While the Ottomans proclaimed their dedication to Sunnism in the early modern period, they also made significant changes to Sunni legal thought and practice in these centuries.