This paper explores the role of the Ottoman Sultan and the Ottoman governor of Egypt in resolving disputes and administering the law in Cairo during the late 17th and early 18th centuries. While previous scholarship has focused on the shari‘a court as the central legal institution in the Ottoman empire, due partly to the importance of shari‘a court records as historical sources, the Sultan and the provincial governor were also intimately involved in the day-to-day administration of justice in Ottoman Cairo. The Sultan, or rather his council known as the divan-i humayun, responded to petitions sent by Egyptians. Many of these petitions concerned private disputes on issues ranging from misappropriation of property through debts to neighborly disagreements over privacy. The governor of Egypt, meanwhile, presided over a tribunal known as the Diwan al-‘Ali, where he heard cases involving property disputes and debts as well as assaults and homicides. These two institutions constituted Ottoman expressions of the Islamic tradition of mazalim: the legal jurisdiction of the sovereign. My paper will examine the procedure and operation of these two institutions, as well as their interactions with each other and with Cairo’s shari‘a courts. I will show that rather than constituting rival jurisdictions, the Sultan, governor and kadi cooperated: a kadi often sat with the governor at his Diwan, while the Sultan often referred cases to the shari‘a court in Cairo. The different institutions respected each other's judgments. I will argue that while there was no significant difference in jurisdiction between them, the more important distinction was one of function. The kadi, using the legal procedures derived from fiqh, was responsible for assessing the veracity of litigants’ claims and establishing facts. The governor and Sultan were responsible for supervising cases in order to prevent corruption and ensure that judgments were enforced. As practiced in Ottoman Egypt, mazalim was not an extraordinary jurisdiction that sought to circumvent the prescriptions of Islamic law, but rather a set of practices that sought to integrate Islamic law more fully into the institutions of government.