Over the past several decades, studies on cultural history of the Ottoman Empire have expanded our understanding of authorship, knowledge, and literacy in the early modern period beyond the strict divide of “high” and “low” cultures. However, as far as the act of writing is concerned, most of the critical textual editions and manuscript-based studies tend to present two discrete spheres: the authors who compose and the scribes who copy, thus espousing an old assumption that scribes were merely means for the mechanical production of texts. My paper calls for a discussion of scribal practices by focusing on a hitherto unexplored culture of compiling the fatwas of the Ottoman chief jurisprudents. I explore how the scribes of chief jurisprudents configured a reference book of jurisprudence, a process that involved collecting, selecting, and classifying thousands of individual fatwa documents, through a close examination of paratextual elements written in Turkish and Arabic from the late fifteenth to the second half of the eighteenth century. Within this context, I foreground a preparatory draft of an ambitious compilation initiative from the eighteenth century by a grandson of the chief jurisprudent Debbagzade Mehmed Efendi (d. 1702). I contend that this vibrant culture of compiling jurisprudential books was informed by a significant question among the scribes of the chief jurisprudents which centered around a particular issue: what kind of reference book compilation provides the readers across the Empire with relevant jurisprudential knowledge while at the same time transmitting the legacy of the chief jurisprudents from reliable sources. Put differently, I argue that beneath the ostensibly impersonal and conventional fabric of textual transmission lie the mediating input of the scribes who were expected to be acquainted with the subtleties of law to perform the craft of compiling fatwas within a collaborative and yet competitive milieu. The paper proposes that exploring the justification and implementation of editorial choices and reference tools for compiling and organizing the fatwas of Ottoman chief jurisprudents can provide us with the ways of understanding the ideals and working methods of the scribes within a manuscript culture. Moreover, it is through reconsidering the position of chief jurisprudents’ scribes that one can also make further steps towards understanding the transmission of law and creating legal authority as it was the culture of compiling fatwas that provided the material support for the integration of fatwas into the doctrinal discourse of a school of Islamic jurisprudence.