When does law enhance sociopolitical stability versus provide openings for change in diverse, highly-globalized societies such as those of the Arab Gulf? With the importance of legal accountability and rights as one of the slogans invoked during the Arab uprising period of 2011, and the pressures for stabilization and retrenchment in the MENA since then, this question takes on added complexity and significance. Indeed, the array of domestic and transnational forces significant for legal politics in the Arab Gulf suggests contingent answers regarding the roles for law in balancing change and stability. This paper focuses on legal actors and their views of the rule of law. It uses original data from a large, multi-year grant project to provide rich responses on how and when legal actors and norms intersect with patterns of sociopolitical change and stabilization in two Gulf states, Qatar and Kuwait. The paper looks specifically at three issues -- what diverse legal actors understand to be the core purposes and sources of the rule of law, how legal norms work in practice, and how legal education influences the growth and evolution of the legal system. These issues are analyzed using specific data from several hundred short surveys of students and several dozen longer interviews with legal practitioners from the two countries. A major argument for the paper is that the range of ideas and strategies for legal actors to embrace, interpret and engage in with respect to the outcome of whether their work serves to move social change, stabilization, or both, is sufficiently variable so that both political ideology and praxis matter a great deal. Specifically, domestic perceptions, and strategic deployment, of international law and shari’a as legal symbols of global, possibly neocolonial norms, and internal legitimacy, respectively, form an important field of contestation with respect to law’s power to put pressure on or buttress sociopolitical norms. How can legal actors in Qatar, Kuwait and similar societies navigate political cleavages around sources of global and domestic legal legitimation to foster a balanced sense of reform amid hyperglobalized growth? One tentative answer from the rich research data would seem to be in moving beyond the symbolic deployment of legal sources to build hybrid spaces for legal dialogue and compromise, as occur to some extent in the higher educational and policy spheres in both countries.