Classical qadi courts combined the roles a modern legal system would divide among several offices: the same judge heard evidence, applied the substantive law of his school, and issued a verdict without a jury and, in the classical procedure, generally without a formal right of appeal to a higher court in the way developed legal systems now provide, relying instead on the qadi's own recognised learning and the ruler's authority behind the office to give the judgment its finality.
The office survives today with sharply different standing depending on the state. Israel, Nigeria, and several other countries with religiously plural legal systems maintain state-recognised qadi courts with formal jurisdiction, typically over Muslim personal status matters such as marriage, divorce and inheritance, their judgments enforceable through the ordinary machinery of the state. In the United Kingdom and other Western countries, by contrast, so-called sharia councils operate without any state recognition at all, functioning in practice closer to a mufti's advisory role or a private arbitration panel than to a true qadi court, a distinction that has caused public confusion and, at times, controversy over what authority, if any, such a body actually holds over the parties who come before it.