In the historiography of Mandate Palestine, the dominant narrative about family and colonial power has held that due to the sensitive nature of the family, British authorities were reluctant to legislate around it, and left family law in the hands of religious courts. Therefore, the argument goes, they did not attempt to intrude on Palestinian family practices. The role of other bodies of law and state court systems in regulating the family has historically been neglected when assessing the impact of the Mandate legal system on Palestinian society. I argue that we need to rethink this conclusion, this approach to family history in Palestine, and potentially in the region as a whole. While the Mandatory government left religious law in the hands of religious courts, they leveraged criminal law to project a new ideal of family that could be enforced by punitive means. The 1936 Criminal Code raised the age of marriage and created additional documentary requirements for girls under the age of legal majority. The archives, in the form of police files and court records, show that these laws about marriage were enforced, and violators were prosecuted. Beyond marriage, new laws about juvenile delinquency, sex work, education, and child welfare provided inroads for the state to assert control over the most intimate aspects of family life, without ever intruding on the authority of religious courts. With a normative family inscribed into law, the British administration created a foundation of state authority on which to build a network of coercive institutions that disciplined the Palestinian family in the name of its own salvation. My research shows that, contrary to the perception that the British administration was less interested in the “civilizing mission” in Palestine, the Mandatory government circumvented preexisting structures of authority to reshape the family, introducing another dimension of social instability to an already volatile climate. In addition, this work challenges the normative methodologies of the field of family history in the Middle East, and argues that that family law has too often been conflated with religious law in the historiography of Palestine. It calls for a reexamination of this approach and a broader consideration of the myriad interactions between the family and the law in Middle Eastern contexts.