This article reflects on my experience recovering and organising two judicial archives in Uganda — the High Court and Mengo Court archives — which had long been neglected due to bureaucratic disinterest and legal hierarchies inherited from the colonial period. Together, these archives contained over 150,000 uncatalogued case files documenting how ordinary Ugandans used both native and colonial British courts to contest injustice and claim rights. Their exclusion from formal archives was not incidental; it reflected a legal order that considered British colonial statutes, appellate decisions and English-language records as authoritative expression of law, while dismissing native court records, as informal without precedential value and unworthy of preservation. Drawing on critical scholarship and my own archival experience, I argue that the archive of law should not be seen merely as a collection of sources or as sites of power and knowledge, but as a space where legal authority and legitimacy are produced, preserved, and erased. The recovery of these records not only unearthed a neglected legal history shaped by ordinary people but also challenges dominant narratives of legal authority in Africa. This work also exposed the omissions in the archival collections, the influence of colonial memory, and the importance of vernacular legal records for both historical research and contemporary legal practice.