Eseru'l- kavâidi'l-fıkhiyye el-kübrâ fi's-sultati'l-kadâiyye Mecelletü'l-ahkâmil-adliyye enmüzecen

Islamic legal maxims have a clear purpose in Islamic law that are a summary of what legal scholars understand of the corpus of texts which constitute the Quran and the Sunnah. Some of those principles which find unanimous support among legal scholars become the foundation upon which legal rulings are formed as well as the bases of law that is instrumental during disagreements. They often substantiates legal verdicts and is relied upon to provide support in court rulings. This is why jurists of the four legal schools as well as others have given them much consideration whether from the technical perspective, tracing their origin, arranging them topically, applying them or studying their sources of references. This was in order that every jurist attains as much insight as is possible of this field. All legal reasoning depends on those legal principles, and every Legal School (madhab) sought to define them, while scholars discussed them elaborately until they were able to define those principles which they agreed upon and those they disagreed upon. Likewise scholars differentiated between Legal Principles, Jurisprudential Principles and Legal …… as each differed from the other.Hence legal scholars in the Islamic civilization strove in order to implement the value of justice in juridical organizations by evaluating it in the period of the rightly guided caliphs alongside the results of the respective era's judicial rulings. The endeavor sought to maintain justice while protecting rights and freedoms. This was in order for these qualities to manifest explicitly in the Ottoman Empire particularly in its latter years (during the era of its reforms) and thus they found principles pertaining to the administration of the state. The most distinguished part in this publication, "The Majalla al-Ahkam al-Adliyya", was the section in the end on judgeship and ruling with regards to judicial authority. This study seeks to show the extent of influence of legal maxims on judicial authority in the Ottoman Empire through "The Majalla al-Ahkam al-Adliyya".In order to achieve that I will search through authentic legal works of the Hanafi Legal School, as well as the remaining legal schools. Also, an analysis of Ottoman State Administration and Judicial Administration documents to ascertain the type of courts and their geographical distribution will be undertaken, while assessing their impact to achieve the value of justice and the preservation of freedoms within the state. The study also focused on the major legal maxims as well as minor (or more general) ones, with reference to legal topics contained in "The Majalla al-Ahkam al-Adliyya".