Scholars have noted the Turkish judiciary’s puzzling combination of fierce independence and statist authoritarianism. In this paper, I trace this paradox back to the early 1930s, when the single-party regime placed its formative legal thinkers in the difficult position of having to articulate doctrines both subservient to state leaders and representative of the new Republic’s identity as a Western country with independent courts, administrators, and academia. I focus in particular on the interwar work of Sıddık Sami Onar and Ali Fuad Başgil, law professors and alternating deans of the Faculty of Law at Istanbul University from the university purge in 1933 until the 1960s. Today Onar and Başgil are mainly remembered for being on opposite sides of the legalistic military coup in 1960, which brought the technocratic Onar to the apex of the state while Başgil, by then a liberal conservative, went into exile. However, before World War Two and the subsequent transition to democracy, Onar and Başgil were widely considered equals in their support of the single-party regime. To understand their significance for the legalistic character of Turkish authoritarianism, I compare their interwar writings both in terms of their theoretical content and in terms of how they reflexively deployed that content to position their own work within the field of the state. In particular, their responses to such transgressions as the 1937 Dersim massacres and the expansion of discretionary state powers with the onset of war in Europe reveal important contrasts in the role they assigned to jurisprudence in the exercise of public power. Başgil’s constitutional scholarship drew inspiration from Fascist legal theory to describe the state as a moral community constituted by its unreflexive loyalty to the “Leader.” In contrast, Onar took advantage of the praxis-oriented discipline of administrative law to develop an immanent critique of jurisdiction that made itself indispensable for the deployment of prerogative power. Onar’s methodology, I suggest, can best be described through a Deleuzian analytics of legal expressionism where theoretically informed state action constitutes its own ground without recourse to an extra-legal Leader. After the transition to democracy, therefore, Başgil’s quasi-Fascist work became irrelevant and outdated, while Onar’s technical and situational doctrine continued to resonate with the self-understanding of jurists, technocrats and army officers as the guardians of the rational interests of the nation-state, allowing an important strand of the authoritarian legalism of the 1930s to survive into the era of democracy.