In his now classic study of Ottoman criminal law, Uriel Heyd included an appendix in which he examined the chapters dealing with criminal law from the best known fiqh compilation from Mughal India - the late seventeenth-century al-Fatawa al-‘Alamgiriyya. Heyd did not elaborate on his decision to include this comparative appendix, but this comparative approach is quite rare in modern scholarship on both Ottoman and Mughal legal history. Ottomanists who study the empire’s legal history have rarely looked east, and to a large extent their Mughalist colleagues have not looked west. This is quite surprising given the publication of several comparative works on the so-called “Gunpowder Empires” since the 1970s, beginning with the publication of Marshall Hodgson’s The Venture of Islam. My paper addresses this historiographical lacuna and presents a blueprint for a study of Islamic law in the central and western Asia in the early modern period by pointing out several important similarities between the legal histories of the Ottoman and the Mughal empires. In particular, I seek to explore the adoption of an official school of law, or of specific branches within the Hanafi school, by each of the dynasties, and to examine the administrative and institutional practices that enabled this adoption. Although the association of a specific branch within the school with a specific dynasty contributed to the emergence of local traditions and authorities across the eastern Islamic lands, my paper also examines the connections and contacts between these traditions and the shared legal culture that spanned both empires. In so doing, I hope to demonstrate that both the Ottoman and the Mughal Empires should be studied in a broader analytical framework, that of the eastern Islamic world in the post-Mongol period. This framework would enable us to account for the differences between the empires, but also to trace the connections between their political and legal traditions, practices, and vocabularies.