Professional jurists are often inquisitive about the subject matter of their calling and in the course of their careers may well develop fascinating insights into the law and those who interpret it. Their employers, however, be they governments, corporations, firms, or private clients, rarely show similar enthusiasm for such insights unless the hours spent pondering the social or historical significance of this or that legal view have a contemporary value that justifies the lawyer's fee.

Thankfully, other members of society are rewarded for mining the legal records of the past. For legal historians, the search often focuses on the changing legal ideas and how legal doctrine develops over time to meet the changing needs of societies. Yet because the law generally deals with concrete matters – again, because jurists are paid by people who are unlikely to remunerate those who simply while away their hours making up legal cases – it offers a reservoir of information that can be used, albeit with caution, in fields other than just the history of the law.

A partial reconstruction of the law of any given time and place is among the more obvious historical uses of legal documents but statutes, practical decisions, and even theoretical texts can be used to advance other forms of the historical endeavour. Legal works often reflect the values both of jurists and society-at-large, for while the law creates social values it is not immune to changes in these very values.

In this essay I reconstruct a dispute that occurred in the middle Maghrib during the first half of the eighth/fourteenth century among members of a wealthy family with strong ties to the state. The pre mortem transfer of shares of a mill to minor children, one male and the other female, carried out ca. 705/1305 became problematic 20 years later, long after the children's father had died. The widowed mother used her position as legal guardian to prevent her daughter – now grown up and married – from exercising effective control over her shares of the mill; eventually, the mother sold her daughter's shares of the mill to her son, a jurist employed by the state. When her attempts to settle the dispute within the family proved unsuccessful, the daughter took her case to a sharī a court judge; the latter solicited the legal advice of a muftī, who called for nullification of the sale. The case sheds light on the operation of the Islamic legal system, points to the willingness of legal actors to uphold the rights of a female against a powerful male relative, and suggests that Muslim judges enjoyed a relatively large measure of judicial autonomy.

This article examines the rate and causes of divorce among the elite households of late fifteenth-century Cairo. By using a unique contemporary chronicle, it is possible to estimate that a third of all marriages ended in divorce. Wives initiated divorces at least as often as their husbands. They did so by reaching a divorce settlement with their husbands for a financial compensation, or, in the case of desertion, by using the courts to impose a judicial divorce. In the vast majority of the cases, the causes for the divorce were grounded in marital relations. In spite of the importance of marriage alliances for the elite household, these marriages did eventually hinge on the mutual consent of the two individuals concerned.

Through an examination of sixteenth-century Ottoman criminal codes pertaining to sexual crimes and their punishment, the article builds on the work of others who have attempted to streamline Islamic legal discourse and new legislation, mainly in the era of Süleyman the Magnificent. An emerging governing elite, recruited through slavery and attached to the sultan's household through marriage and patronage, attempted to create a legal system that, while committed to the tenets of Islamic law, promoted the new values of a dynamic group of people, which differed in many ways from those envisaged by the sharī a. The new legal codes suggest a change in discourse and outlook regarding various aspects of sexuality, gender differences, and concepts of crime and punishment.

This article is devoted to an analysis of Algerian court cases. It focuses on family law in practice, in order to shed light on the disputed character of this realm of law and the ambiguity involved in its reform. The aim of the article is to question the assumption of an intrinsic opposition between the (traditional/Muslim) family on the one hand, and (modern) state law on the other. It will be argued that the legal regulation of the family, far from being simply imposed by the state, represents a dynamic process in which different actors with different interests and orientations partake. The material used consists mainly of decisions taken by the Algerian Supreme Court covering the period from 1963 (the year of the its creation) to 1990.

Adolescent experience has been the subject of an intensive interdisciplinary discourse for the last century; a subject whose roots go back to the basic issue of ‘nature versus nurture’. In examining this topic in Jewish medieval society under Islam, an incongruity is revealed between the normative attitudes at the time and the reality. The normative attitudes, as exhibited in religious law (halakha) and in the moral literature represent man's life as a journey which peaks upon reaching full adulthood. The different stages of life along the way are acknowledged but they are perceived as subsidiary, sometimes even dangerous. But the reality does not concur: adolescents were far from invisible during this period. Indeed, their presence was prominent and reflected in the poetry and the prevailing images of youth from the time. Jewish society had developed an efficient system for socializing its adolescents, which included an apprenticeship system, higher education (the beit midrash) and early marriage.

In legal texts, women, acting on their own volition, are actually described as individuals in negative terms. This study examines clandestine betrothals and marriages; adultery, especially the treatment of adulterous women; the abused wife and her ability to initiate divorce proceedings against her husband; and testaments left with Christian notaries by Jewish women.

While they were limited by various laws and customs, individuals managed to use laws and social structures for their own advantage, negotiated space for themselves, and devised strategies to fulfil their wishes, which could be described as the pursuit of love, by circumventing obstacles placed in their way by communities, families, and the law. These practices raise questions about familial control, rabbinic authority, and communal power.