The consular courts were a legal institution of exception: they were meant for those outside of conventional jurisdiction. The minority they served sought, often with success, to make of foreign protection a privilege. Yet in an institutional sense the courts were deeply dependent. They relied on Egyptian police, jails, and hospitals to enforce their verdicts. They relied on the broader Egyptian legal profession, as few lawyers could support themselves working exclusively for consular courts. They relied on Egypt's other courts whenever their foreign subjects occupied the plaintiff position. Thus the irony of consular justice in Egypt: legal theory's claims of foreign sovereignty were not borne out in practice. In this paper, I demonstrate the dependency of consular legal institutions in Egypt on the local justice system. First, I discuss the personnel dimension: police, guards, jailors, lawyers, and the judges themselves (who were also part time workers). Then I survey the legal mechanisms that enabled the consular courts to carry out their limited legal work: law codes and ministerial policies drawn up in order to preserve the consulates' space of legal exception. I next follow the procedures of a typical pluralist court case. Finally, I show how the consular courts provided services to other legal institutions.