While debates within Islamic law scholarship have focused on a particular moment of transformation or rupture when European-modeled codification redefined law in nineteenth-century Egypt, the aim of this paper is to explore the underexplored shifts that took place on the ground in law throughout this central Ottoman province on the eve of this fateful transformation. Transformations in law do not take place in a vacuum. With respect to the question of equality before the law, that transformation would leave an indelible mark on a new society that came to define its laws. For it is this society (al-hay’a al-ijtimāʻīya) that late nineteenth-century Ottoman legal thinkers and writers heralded as being “comprised of individual members who were equal before the law.” This was a groundbreaking concept within Ottoman domains where subjects had for centuries belonged hierarchically within a Circle of Justice in which everyone fit within a certain order, both conceptually and legally, according to the Islamic legal tradition. Still, as critical as this concept of society became in unfettering the traditional hierarchies to which Egypt’s subjects had disparately belonged and redefined how they now stood before a modern law, this article digs deeper to investigate how this concept of society became a historical reality and subsequently redefined law in modern Egypt. Specifically, it investigates whether and how the Tanzimat reforms that hallmarked the late Ottoman Empire affected the equal treatment of Egypt’s subjects across the nineteenth century before newly budding state councils (majālis) conceived within an expanding administrative khedival state. In exploring this latter question, this article considers, in tandem with these inflected top-down Tanzimat reforms, whether there was already a dynamic local experiment begun towards attaining an equal or more equitable treatment of Egypt’s local subjects before their administrative khedival state? Furthermore, in uncovering this local experiment, who were its key scientists: was it solely Egypt’s khedival rulers and their administrators, or rather, did Egypt’s subjects who petitioned, plead, demanded, and insisted that their interests be heard and that they be seen on a more equal footing before this state and its intractable institutions, shape the contours of social justice and their equal treatment before the law? These are indeed large questions that this paper does not purport to answer fully, but rather to sketch some answers building on existing, and suggesting further, areas of historical research.