In the last couple of decades, Ottoman history, like other fields of historical research, has been affected by the linguistic and cultural turns. At the same time and not unrelated to this influence, socio-legal approaches have been developed within Ottoman history. The latter change may be particularly discerned in sicill-based social history, a sub-field of study of Ottoman history which has been developed since the late 1960s. My aim in this paper is to demonstrate the implementation of certain theoretical arguments, which were pursued in the wake of the linguistic and cultural turns into studies based on sicills (sharia court records), claiming that the contribution of such methods to nuanced interpretations of court records and historical documents in general is invaluable. Inspired by Ann Stoler’s observation (that titles this paper) regarding the way historians -- in her case, historical anthropologists -- should approach archives, this paper will focus on some new methods for studying sicills. My point of departure is that court records, or any historical documents for that matter, should not be treated simply as a collection of historical facts. I assume, instead, that form and content are interdependent. Hence, the entire context within which certain sicills were produced -- the court in question, its personnel, their interrelations and interactions with the legal administrative system and with the court users – require investigation as part and parcel of studying the texts of these sicills. Studying 19th-century court records from Palestine, the Ottoman legal reform that took place in this period, along with local transformation processes, will form major themes by way of illustrating contextualization of the sicills in question. In addition to court records, I will draw on legal and administrative instructions which the Ottoman government distributed to the provincial sharia courts, and personal files of judges and other court personnel from Müftüluk.