This paper challenges the conventional emphasis on Ottoman law, legality, and legitimacy as subjects of elite discourse or the results of elite endeavor, be these elites state agents or their non-state counterparts spread throughout the empire. Most would now accept that law, in any context, is not merely the byproduct of juristic determination or ruling fiat; instead, those subject to the law, those meant to be governed by it, influence its nature in varying and ongoing ways. This paper attempts to bring this mass audience for Ottoman law fully into a discussion of how the law was enacted and how its meanings for a wider public might be accessed. I will investigate—using law codes, law court records, legal formularies, and local literature from the late-Mamluk and early-Ottoman Arabic-speaking world—how Ottoman law-making showed awareness of a need to reach beyond the elite. A critical issue involves the law’s inscription or codification in a situation of indeterminate mass literacy. Accordingly, the paper will examine the practical (and performative) mechanisms of promulgation and enforcement, and their limits. And it will explore the use of written documents as legal artifacts or talismans, important in their physical nature as much for the textual meanings they contain. A key hermeneutical adjustment will be toward a more expansive understanding of “literacy” (following much recent work in New Literacy Studies). Just as law did not originate at the top or center and move from there unidirectionally, nor was literacy an elite or educated preserve. The study will note topics such as forgery and document manipulation and madhhab identities for their broader implications. I will show that the salience and dynamism of Ottoman law-making, especially during this iconic period of imperial formation, was not simply the result of elite ingenuity but was responding to deep-rooted trends in both legal history and evolving mass literacy.