Abstract
In 1884 an Ottoman public prosecutor and fellow officials stood trial for abusing their official authorities when attending to an incident in one of Istanbul's neighborhoods. A published verbatim report of the proceedings is used in this article for discussing Ottoman socio-legal change in the late nineteenth century, employing a microhistorical perspective. Following a major reform in the new court system, which was established in the 1860s (the Nizamiye courts), the judicial authorities used the trial in question for transmitting the commitment of the modernizing state to the rule of law, exhibited by the principle of officials' accountability. Features of the reformed judicial system and its distinctive legal culture are demonstrated in this article by unfolding the judicial aspects of this episode and by discussing connections between them and the immediate socio-political and socio-legal contexts of the trial.
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