Scholarship on the Mamluk state’s mazalim and shari‘a courts have revealed a flexibility and diversity, where legal authority was exercised by numerous parties, justice privatized in the later years of the regime, and the lines between secular and religious law and authority were blurred. Recent studies of charity have further highlighted the options available to the urban poor and disenfranchised in their search for retribution and redress, ranging from the mediatory and conciliatory roles of neighborhood and Sufi institutions to more systematized methods of petition. The system described throughout is uniquely urban, relying on formal legal institutions, as revealed by legal treatises and fatwa collections, biographical entries of Cairo-based judges, and chronicles. The execution of justice in smaller cities is somewhat less familiar. The Jerusalem courts have been a focus of study, largely through the work of Little (for the fourteenth century) and Singer (for the sixteenth), who have described the kinds of cases brought to court and the formal processes there of record-keeping and resolution. Less is known about the legal systems beyond these urban centers. The region of the Transjordan (today’s Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan) is a case in point. Comprising the eastern frontier of the Mamluk state, the region passed in and out of direct Mamluk control as the state’s strategic objectives developed. The tribal structures of the region at time buttressed, at others challenged, the state, creating its own constellations of power and institutions of conflict resolution. It is the purpose of this paper to describe the mechanisms by which rural societies sought justice in late medieval Islam and the institutions – both formal (state-defined) and informal (traditional) – that supported them. The chronological focus is the Mamluk period. This paper argues for a greater informality of legal exercise in the region of the Transjordan, where tribal ties and the fluid relations among peasants and pastoralists mediated conflict and accomplished redress, than in the urban centers of Egypt and Syria. The study relies on a combination of contemporary and early Ottoman Shari‘a records from Jerusalem and Damascus, petitions from St. Catherine’s Monastery in Mt. Sinai, biographical dictionaries, and primarily Syrian-based chronicles to describe the structure of local and regional courts, trace the development of local judges’ careers, document the process of petition-making, account for the source and resolution of formal legal disputes, and illustrate the ways conflicts were resolved outside the courts through community intervention and armed revolt.