Responding to this panel’s focus on the “new wave” of Algerian (and Maghribi) historiography, enabled by decentralized approaches and access to new sources, this paper will examine the ways in which non-elite Algerian subjects strategically engaged with and/or resisted the French colonial legal apparatus in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. This paper presents both research from my work with recently-opened Algerian judicial archives and reflections on the possibilities and limitations of these archives for the study of Algerian “everyday life” under colonial occupation. This research attempts to correct for the narrowed focus on prescriptive texts and state-centric perspectives endemic to much of the literature on both law (especially Muslim legal traditions) and colonialism, which are often abstracted from the material realities of the subjects with whom they were concerned. The core evidence for this study is drawn from the records of appeals that were filed with the French civil tribunal in the city of Blida, which also served as the district court hearing Muslim appeals for the ertswhile Blida arrondissement (in the hinterland of the département d’Alger). These archives show us how Muslim litigants pursuing civil suits either before qadis or French magistrates (and often both) displayed competencies in Islamic legal norms, local extra-legal norms, French law, as well as French Orientalist understandings of Islamic law (often inspired by contemporaneous Ottoman reforms). I thus propose that “legal pluralism” is an often inadequate, and sometimes distorted, lens through which to view these processes. For many Muslim disputants, the hierarchy between Islamic, French, and local “customary” legal norms and forums was not given, a fact reflected in their strategies which are more akin to legal syncretism or synthesis. Litigants might, for example, bring their French lawyer to the qadi court or bring their elder kin to French court; not infrequently, they used French legal venues in order to gain leverage in Islamic or non-state venues of dispute resolution, and vice versa. This paper also aims to contribute to the project of “provincializing Europe” within colonial history generally and Algerian history specifically, not only by privileging microhistory at the local scale, but also by situating these histories within wider regional and global circuits of knowledge-production about Islam, legal reform, and “modernization” in which Algeria was a nexus and transfer point.