The consular courts were a legal institution of exception: they were meant for those outside of conventional jurisdiction. The minority they served sought, often with success, to make of foreign protection a privilege. Yet in an institutional sense the courts were deeply dependent. They relied on Egyptian police, jails, and hospitals to enforce their verdicts. They relied on the broader Egyptian legal profession, as few lawyers could support themselves working exclusively for consular courts. They relied on Egypt's other courts whenever their foreign subjects occupied the plaintiff position. Thus the irony of consular justice in Egypt: legal theory's claims of foreign sovereignty were not borne out in practice. In this paper, I demonstrate the dependency of consular legal institutions in Egypt on the local justice system. First, I discuss the personnel dimension: police, guards, jailors, lawyers, and the judges themselves (who were also part time workers). Then I survey the legal mechanisms that enabled the consular courts to carry out their limited legal work: law codes and ministerial policies drawn up in order to preserve the consulates' space of legal exception. I next follow the procedures of a typical pluralist court case. Finally, I show how the consular courts provided services to other legal institutions.

While the Islamic legal (shari‘a) records of the Ottoman Egyptian courts have been studied extensively by scholars, those of the early twentieth century have only recently been unearthed by the staff of the Egyptian National Archives and, as a result, they have remained virtually untapped by scholars. In order to assist scholars navigate these yet to be catalogued registers, this paper details the various courts, personnel, cases, and litigants who frequented the Islamic legal system of early twentieth-century Egypt. Its registers differ tremendously from their earlier counterparts most significantly because of a wave of legal reforms the Egyptian administration launched to “modernize” the shari‘a legal system between 1897 and 1931. While British colonial officials, Egyptian nationalists, and even contemporary scholars have either criticized or downplayed the significance and success of these extensive shari‘a reforms, this paper demonstrates that they resulted in a completely revamped as well as a more bureaucratized and hierarchical legal system that constituted a major rupture in Egyptian Islamic court practices and procedures from the earlier Ottoman era. Specifically, this paper examines a series of codes passed in 1897, 1909-1910, 1923, and 1931 that regulated court operations and legal procedures; dictated the jurisdiction of the courts and selected the laws to be implemented; and outlined the selection, training, and appointment of judges, lawyers, notaries, scribes, and inspectors. It also analyzes how the new personal status laws that were passed in 1920 and 1929 were interpreted by shari‘a court judges, translated into practice in the courtrooms, and understood by litigants. This paper concludes by describing how the Islamic courts were reorganized into a clear hierarchy of lower-level and appellate courts, the types of cases adjudicated in the various sub-courts, and the kinds of litigants who aired their grievances in its courtrooms.

To understand how a new Egyptian law has taken form over the last two centuries, it is necessary to look at the last quarter of nineteenth century and especially at the Mixed Courts (mahâkim mukhtalata). In 1875, under the khedive Ismâ'îl, legal and judicial reforms resulted in the establishment of the Mixed Courts as well as codes and the personal status code of Qadri Pacha. Under the British, the reform continued and, in 1883 the Native Courts (mahâkim misr ahliyya) were created inspired by the Mixed Courts. This study is based on extensive research in archival collections in Egyptian legal institutions (Cairo and Alexandria), in Lebanese private archives (Beirut) and in the French Archives (Paris, Nantes, Roubaix, Lyon and Aix). First, I want to demonstrate that the legal transfers inspired by the civil law model (French, Belgium and Italian influences) were the result of numerous economic, human and political factors, for example the flow of people (the European and Ottoman "traveller-lawyers"), goods and ideas (civil, commercial, penal and administrative law of continental Europe), the Emancipation of Egypt as an Ottoman province, the importance of such key-players as Ismâ'îl Pacha (1863-1879) and his Minister of Foreign Affairs Nubar Pacha and the British government. Next, I show the coexistence of different legal sources in new mixed codes, case-law and French-Arabic dictionaries. I demonstrate that the Mixed Courts were established to settle disputes in which European and Locals had an interest. It is important to give some details on the personel (judges, lawyers...) who came from various European countries and Arab provinces. This phenomen of technology transfers was also the result of new law schools created in Cairo such as the Khedivial School of Law (1868) and French law School (1890). Finally, I analyze why Local and European personel of the Mixed Courts criticized them after the Egyptian Revolution in 1919. This section is based on the study of one register of the Mixed Court of Appeal in Alexandria and on articles published in law reviews in Egypt between 1919 and 1949, the year of the abolition of the Mixed Courts.