El-Sanhūrī's multi-volume masterwork, Al-Wasīṭ fī sharḥ al-qānūn al-madanī al-jadīd, a comprehensive commentary on the Egyptian Civil Code of 1948 and on civil law more generally, published during 1952-1970, remains in print and is highly regarded in legal and juristic professions throughout the Arab world.

He presided over a committee which drafted the Iraqi Civil Code, while at the same time serving as dean of the Baghdad Law School, from 1935 to 1937.

His father, who, by the time of el-Sanhūrī's birth, had lost his fortune, worked as a 'minor' employee at the Alexandria Municipal Council.

He was subsequently assigned to the position of Deputy Prosecutor at the National Court of Mansura which he retained until 1919, when his incitement of riots during the Egyptian Revolution of 1919 led to his dismissal.

In February 1936, Rashid Ali al-Gaylani, then the Minister of Interior, put together a committee of jurists for the drafting of an Iraqi Civil Code, which he tasked el-Sanhūrī with presiding over.

Power struggles between Mohamed Naguib and Gamal Abdel Nasser eventually brought the Council of State to the attention of the military.

During March 1954, when the Egyptian Bar Association made demands for a return to civil government, el-Sanhūrī, whose opposition to military rule had by that time become clear, was forcibly dismissed.

[7] One explanation put the assault to a publication by Al-Akhbār newspaper claiming that the Council of State "was about to issue decrees against the Revolution .

The reason he resorted to European civil law and Western jurisprudence was not on identitarian or colonial premises, rather, it was on account of their highly elaborate and intellectualised character.

In this way, justice would remain faithful to its historic roots but with an invariable view of reaching humanistic ends; particularly when state legislation, the sharia and traditional customs all fail to find a solution to one or more legal or juridical problems.

[15] The tenets of El-Sanhūrī's philosophy are unity and experience; as he explains in Le Califat, a careful balance must be achieved between both: It will be prudent, in reducing modernized Muslim law to legislative expression, to have recourse to formulas flexible enough to allow for the adaptation of the system by the courts to the changing needs of court practice through following the general guidelines set out by doctrine.

It will also be desirable that a relative unity of vision guides the legislators of different Muslim countries, which will happen by the very force of the pursuit [of sources], since they will draw all the first inspirations of their legislative work from the same source, Muslim doctrine; but it will of course also be necessary to take into account the particularities of the economic life of each country...

[16]One commentator argued that el-Sanhūrī's codes reflected a "hodgepodge of socialist doctrine and sociological jurisprudence.