The institutional configuration of Egypt's judicial system, particularly in the domain of personal status law, can be explained as the outcome of contestation between religious minority groups and the state over the extent to which these groups are permitted to exercise either substantive or procedural judicial autonomy. Shapiro (1986) and Scott (1999) explain that states seek to eliminate rivals to the state’s monopoly on coercive power as exercised through its judiciary in order to retain control over norm-setting via dispute adjudication and taxing powers through property rights regimes. Moustafa (2008) expands this argument to include authoritarian states, which use courts to monitor bureaucratic agents and reduce corruption. Minority groups, conversely, attempt to maintain control over the laws that govern their members, particularly with respect to family law. In Egypt, although the judiciary is centralized, each religious group has a separate legal code that governs disputes between co-religionists in state family law courts. Through archival and interview-based research, this paper argues that this semi-pluralistic arrangement is primarily the result of contestation between the Coptic Orthodox Church, Egypt’s largest religious minority, and the Egyptian state. The simultaneous deterioration of Coptic adjudication forums and a breakdown in bargaining between the Coptic Pope and President Nasser allowed partial centralization Egypt’s judicial system. However, the state stopped short of complete decentralization, which would have provoked massive dissent, and instead isolated family law as the sole arena of pluralism within an otherwise unified judiciary. Before his death, Pope Shenouda successfully strengthened the Coptic Orthodox Church’s administrative structure and concentrated power in the office of the Pope, which permitted an increase in bargaining between Pope Shenouda and President Mubarak. Newspaper accounts and interviews reveal that before the 2011 ‘revolution,’ Coptic leadership expected that a measure of judicial decentralization might result, allowing further autonomy for Coptic family law. Although subsequent events altered these prospects, the Egyptian judiciary is once again a zone for contestation for the meaning of Egyptian citizenship and the inclusion of diverse judicial forms.