According to Islamic law, slaves in the Ottoman Empire were considered as property. Once a person became a slave, he or she came under the law of property and could be bought and sold like any other commodity. Thus, we can see slaves listed alongside livestock and household goods as part of an estate inventory. With this status, slaves had no capacity to have rights, but capacity to act. They could get the power of attorney to trade or to assign property for example. At the same time, slaves made use of the court to ensure their manumission, to register their contracts, and to protect their inherited property rights. We can also find entries revealing that a current or former slave even sued the heirs of his or her master to contest the apportionment of an estate. With regard to these entries, the clear categorization of slaves as property seems to vanish and the classification of free and unfree or slave and non-slave seems to be more nuanced than regulated by legal terms. Besides this, (former) female and male slaves were affected in different ways indicating differences in terms of slave interagency. For example in the entries of the Istanbul court registers, we can find a more or less equal number of male and female slaves manumitted in the consequence of a pious act, but far less female slaves among those manumitted according to the conditions previously agreed upon in contracts between slaves and slave owners. The analysis of social interactions between slaves and others documented in the entries of the Ottoman court registers of Istanbul in the 16th and 17th centuries should help to break with the focus on polar or binary pairs social and legal categories tend to. Instead, rather nuanced continuums should be reflected. The study of manumissions, records of escapes, proofs of non-slave status, donations, etc., will show that the clear lines of the legal categorization blur when it comes to the terms of the de facto status. The analysis of these records also provides insights into the lives of (former) female and male slaves that were shaped individually by de jure and de facto regulations and allowed different ways of slave interagency.