There may be no more stark expression of colonial conquest than the requisition of land. In Algeria, the historical processes by which French colonizers appropriated land from Muslim locals in order to attract and sustain the settler population is well documented. Perhaps most famously, the 1873 Warnier Act helped dismantle the system of pious endowments (waqf/habous) and established a French private property regime while also undercutting the main source of revenue to the zawiya (religious “lodges” of sufi brotherhoods). To justify this legislation, French legal Orientalists set out to prove that not only were awqaf (pl.) outside the purview of Muslim “personal status” law (theoretically protected from French interference) but even, they argued, un-Islamic and essentially illegal (Powers 1989). The historiography on colonial Algeria largely accepts the self-evidence of “personal status” as a category governed by religious authority and defined in opposition to a sphere of state authority that oversaw social and criminal matters. Yet, as this paper shows, the actual limits of “personal status” law were an enduring source of uncertainty for French jurists and administrators, and its boundaries were routinely negotiated and contested by Muslim Algerian subjects. No-where is the drama of this negotiation better demonstrated than in the colonial courtroom. Using records from personal status file cases in Algerian municipal archives, supplemented with the public record of colonial jurisprudence and statutes, this study reveals how in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries Algerians, and particularly Algerian women, frequented colonial courts of Muslim law to protect their property rights. Even as French colonial reformers put their energies into regulating personal status matters concerning Muslim women (particularly divorce, polygamy, and consent in marriage) they drafted land dispossession laws that had a disproportionally egregious effect on these same women. Compounding this irony, as these records show, by far the most prevalent reason Algerian women went to court was to challenge their male relatives, in-laws, ex-husbands, and even children in order to protect the inheritance rights that Islamic law afforded them. This paper explores the strategies they deployed in this effort, most prominently pre-emption (shufaa). This research contributes to various historiographies by uncovering for the first time a key site of Algerian women’s encounter with the colonial state. It also uses social history methodologies to personalize and better understand the effects of the colonial private property regime.