This panel asks how Islamic and Jewish legal documents from premodern Egypt allow scholars to reconstruct Islamic legal history from the ground up. Until relatively recently, most legal histories in medieval Middle Eastern studies have been based on top-down approaches that rely on the descriptions of judicial institutions and legal proceedings in the normative works of Muslim jurists. Such scholarship makes little use of documentary sources in part because of the incorrect assumption that the Islamic world did not produce documents as abundantly as medieval Europe. These papers will complement the top-down approaches by working from the everyday legal records that Muslim and Jewish courts produced and looking at the materiality of these documents. The papers all mine a cache of documentary materials known as the Cairo Geniza, which consists of tens of thousands of documents in Arabic and Judaeo-Arabic (Arabic written in Hebrew script) dating from the tenth to the nineteenth century. The verbal content and materiality of court proceedings and legal deeds show how judges, litigants, and scribes shaped the law. The papers substantiate these arguments in different ways. Paper one studies notaries’ notes on Islamic legal deeds to illuminate institutions and practices beyond the purview of legal manuals and even qāḍīs. Paper two examines the lives and afterlives of judicial documents to which further judicial records and addenda were physically sewn, creating a mini-archive. The materiality of these documents reveals what Daisy Livingston has recently argued was a continuum of practices between archiving and discarding. Paper three looks at Ottoman era qāḍī-court records from the Geniza and demonstrates how litigants kept judicial records at home to produce them later as evidence if necessary—a counter to the regnant view that qāḍīs’ dīwāns and state bureaus were the prime loci of judicial archiving. Together these papers shed light on how Islamic judicial institutions actually functioned and how material instruments shaped legal proceedings. They suggest that a bottom-up approach to legal history can allow scholars working across different legal regimes in the medieval and early modern Islamicate world not only to fill gaps in the literary sources, but also to reevaluate their role in juridical discourse.