Works of adab al-qāḍī, or "The Judge's Protocol," are an Islamic genre that is characterized by the juristic concern with the judge’s role and responsibilities in legal procedures of a case. This genre was written by jurists, some of whom had also held positions as judges, to demonstrate their commitment to the subordination of the exercise of power to a well-defined legal system within the parameters of fiqh. Due to the fact that the genre occurs solely as works of substantive law (furūʿ), modern scholarship has utilized this legal literature primarily as reference works to be mined for discrete types of historical information about the judiciary, rather than as an autonomous, comprehensive legal genre. However, this form of analysis ignores how the depiction of judgeship as derivative of the jurists’ ideals of a political ruler brings adab al-qāḍī into discourse with other earlier literary, non-legal genres, particularly advice literature for rulers known as the “mirror for princes.” Whereas the short adab portion of an adab al-qāḍī work functions as the recommended set of behavioral rules for the judge to maintain the dignity of his office, distinguished from the rest of the text its lack of legal justifications, this legal genre’s intersections with adab literature go well beyond this aspect. By examining both Sunnī and Shīʿī works of adab al-qāḍī from Iran and Iraq in the 10th-14th centuries CE, I will show that concerns about power and rulership in mirror for princes texts permeate not only the genre as a whole, but also inform juristic legal reasoning within the adab al-qāḍī works themselves. A comparative analysis with adab literature thus demonstrates how adab al-qāḍī texts as a genre are distinct from other works of furūʿ, both as individual works and as chapters in a single furūʿ text.