Imperial edicts, registers of important affairs, military police documents, inspection registers and other documents of the central administration can provide insights about official policies and means by which the Ottoman government aimed to maintain public order in Istanbul. However, they do not offer much information on the responses of the inhabitants of the city to a perceived lack of order and security in their surroundings. In this paper, I will analyze selected court records (sijils) of Istanbul in order to examine different issues of public order that arose among the city’s inhabitants and the ways in which such conflicts reached the shari‘a courts in the city. I will argue that, as far as public order offenses were concerned, judges played mainly the role of facilitator to reach an amicable settlement between the parties to a conflict and were primarily concerned with maintaining social harmony in the community. Residents had significant autonomy in matters of their neighborhood and in determining who was worthy of being a member of their community and who was not in their eyes. My analysis will rely primarily on the records of the courts of the judge and the deputy judge of inner Istanbul (Istanbul mahkemesi and Bab mahkemesi) between the years 1789 and 1793. The presence and mingling of “unidentified” persons (mechulu’l-ahval) in residential and commercial neighborhoods were perceived as a threat to public order and security, which required that community members were “identifiable” (ma‘lumu’l-ahval) to each other and to the authorities. I will show in my paper how residents made use of these legal categories before the judge to determine who should be expelled from their neighborhoods and on what grounds. I believe my paper will contribute to a more nuanced understanding of the dynamics of neighborhood life in Istanbul in this period, as well as the relationship between the courts and inhabitants of the city. Combined with the other papers on our panel, I hope to be able to draw more reliable conclusions about these dynamics based on a larger pool of data from the court records.