On December 31, 2010, a major Egyptian daily headlined one of its year-in-review articles, “Majles al-Dawla: the hero that ruled Egypt in 2010.” The article reviewed a score of administrative court rulings handed down that year that challenged the government on sensitive matters of domestic and foreign policy. It interviewed legal specialists who lauded the role of the courts and denounced the government’s failure to implement judicial rulings. Why would the arcane administrative courts be adjudicating key policy issues and developing such a high profile? This paper traces the roots of administrative court prominence, showing how citizens’ individual and collective resort to the courts has catapulted the institution onto political center stage. It argues that citizens’ legal mobilization has turned into a distinct political act in contemporary Egypt, now routinely used by disgruntled individuals, rights activists, workers, opposition coalitions, students, and farmers. The paper places the rise of administrative litigation as a political act within the context of contemporary Egyptian politics. Starting in the mid-1990s, associational life and electoral politics in Egypt have been progressively restricted or extinguished altogether. Elections at every level have been restricted or suspended. Non-governmental organizations are highly monitored, and political parties are hemmed in by confining regulations and government divide-and-rule tactics. In such a context of increasing repression and the imposition of high costs to collective action, the individual act of suing a government official in the administrative courts gained traction. First used by individual lawyers as a colorful mode of self-expression, petitioning the courts soon spread to other sectors and took in a wide array of issues, from urban residents contesting municipal ordinances to professors, workers, and women’s rights activists suing ministers, governors, and the president. To capture the phenomenon of legal mobilization as a political act, the paper surveys both high-profile and obscure instances of litigation. It is based on interviews with petitioners and judges; analysis of court rulings and contemporaneous press accounts; and insights drawn from the law-and-society literature on legal mobilization in democracies. The paper reveals the logic behind the seemingly symbolic act of petitioning the courts, demonstrating how citizens establish links to judges who then are spurred to activate their constitutional oversight of an unaccountable executive branch. Legal mobilization has created a new arena for doing politics in Egypt, establishing the political standing of previously anonymous, powerless citizens and extracting a modicum of responsiveness from a remote and unaccountable government.