In this excerpt from his biographical dictionary of judges, Wakīʿ reports an incident in Kūfa in which a man sought the opinion of three legal experts—Abū Ḥanīfa, Ibn Shubruma, and Ibn Abī Laylā—on the status of a sale and received three different opinions to his query. In her analysis of Islamic mirrors-for-princes literature on judging in Justice and Leadership in Early Islamic Courts, Louise Marlow cites this case as an example of the lack of uniformity in legal rulings during the early centuries of Islam.
This source is part of the Online Companion to the book Justice and Leadership in Early Islamic Courts, ed. Intisar A. Rabb and Abigail Krasner Balbale(ILSP/HUP 2017)—a collection of primary sources and other material used in and related to the book.