In premodern North Africa, legal practice allowed a couple to marry after engaging in (consensual) premarital sex, thus averting punishment, avoiding stigma, and allowing a path to paternity and inheritance rights for children. This study draws on disputes preserved in fatwa collections such as Ahmad al-Wansharisi’s (d. 1508) al-Miʿyar to explore how the interplay between women, family, community, and the legal system led to resolution of these extramarital encounters. Using the case study of a young woman from fifteenth-century Marinid Fez who ran away with a man she wanted to marry to circumvent her father’s authority, in addition to other cases from the region, this paper argues that the legal system functioned in premodern North Africa as an integral part of social networks, and that women’s engagement with Islamic law was routine and demonstrated clear agency. As a point of comparison, the paper will also show how women’s relationship to the law changed in the modern period as colonial and post-colonial legal reforms gutted the legal system and the social networks that supported it (Hallaq 2009). This combined with a loss of societal, communal, and family support, brought on in part by neoliberal economic reforms, to the direct detriment of women (Salime 2015; Errazzouki 2014). Analyzing the fifteenth-century case of sexual agency alongside the tragedy of a Moroccan teenager who committed suicide in 2012 after family, community, and legal system came together to pressure her into marrying her alleged rapist, I argue that changes in both social and legal structures put premodern dispute resolution mechanisms in jeopardy and forced women who strayed outside of legally or socially accepted boundaries into more vulnerable positions with less support to resolve transgressions. Works Cited: Errazzouki, Samia. 2014. “Working-class women revolt: gendered political economy in Morocco.” The Journal of North African Studies 19 (2): 259-267. Hallaq, Wael. 2009. An Introduction to Islamic Law. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Salime, Zakia. 2015. “Arab Revolutions: Legible, Illegible Bodies.” Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East 35 (3): 525-538. al-Wansharisi, Ahmad ibn Yahya. 1981. Al-Miʿyar al-Muʿrib wa al-Jamiʿ al-Mughrib ʿan Fatawi Ahl Ifriqiyah wa al-Andalus wa al-Maghrib [The Comprehensive Criterion and the Extensive Collection of Fatwas of the People of Ifriqiyya and al-Andalus and al-Maghrib]. Edited by Muhammad Hajji. 13 vols. Rabat: Wizarat al-Awqaf wa al-Shuʾun al-Islamiyya lil-Mamlaka al-Maghribiyya.