In January 1871, an unusual printing was completed from Cairo’s Kāstalīya Press. Mūsā Kāstalī (b. 1816), the Italian-born owner and founder of the press, almost certainly had a hand in this affair. For the document was an eighty-three page defense of Mūsā’s claims against the Azharite Shaykh Ḥasan al-ʻIdwī al-Ḥamzāwī (1806-1886), who, Mūsā argued, had initiated the dispute when he refused to pay for the books that he commissioned off of Mūsā’s press. The matter had twice been heard at the commercial courts and decided in Shaykh Ḥasan’s favor. With little chance for judicial recourse, Mūsā’s case was now presented to the court of public opinion through the vehicle of print. The treatise was a curious mix of the drama of a business transaction gone sour, the intricacies of Cairene private printing, and the nuances of Egyptian, Ottoman, and European law. Indeed, it called for the reform of Egypt’s legal system. This paper uses Mūsā’s printing as a starting point for examining the ways in which material culture constituted the law in late nineteenth century Egypt. Specifically, I focus on how printed texts, and ideas about print, mediated peoples' engagement with the law. Why did the Egyptian state begin printing its laws from the second quarter of the nineteenth century, and did its purpose change? For whom were these texts intended? And how did people like Mūsā use them, and contest them, within and beyond the court? Mūsā’s treatise invoked multiple realms of legality through overtures made to the Cairene police, the commercial courts, the Italian consular court, the imperial Porte, and even threats to have the khedive and the Italian government intervene. His printing not only connects these legal entities which are often approached separately in historiography, but it also speaks to a broader intersection between printing and the law as the increasing ubiquity of the former changed legal practice for religious scholars, lawyers, and citizens into the early twentieth century. I therefore conclude with an examination of the impulses behind the printing of legal compilations like Muḥammad ibn Muḥammad al-Mahdī al-ʻAbbāsī's al-Fatāwā al-Mahdīya, Fīlīb Jallād's Qāmūs al-idāra wa-al-qaḍāʼ, and Aḥmad Fatḥī Zaghlūl's al-Muḥāmā, and of responsa like the fatwas mailed in to al-Manār. I argue that they betray Egyptians’ new ideas regarding governance and legality, and the power of print to preserve, stabilize, and amplify content.