Egyptian President Mohamed Mursi met senior judges yesterday to try to defuse a crisis over his seizure of new powers.
Mr Mursi's decree, last week, set off violent protests reminiscent of the revolution last year that led to the rise of his Islamist movement.
One person has been killed and about 370 injured in clashes between police and protesters over the decree shielding his decisions from judicial review.
The justice minister said he believed Mr Mursi would agree with Egypt's highest judicial authority on its proposal to limit the scope of the new powers.
But the protesters, some camped in Cairo's Tahrir Square, have said only retracting the decree will satisfy them, a sign of the deep rift between Islamists and their opponents that is destabilising Egypt two years after Hosni Mubarak was ousted.
"There is no use amending the decree," protester Tarek Ahmed, 26, said. "It must be scrapped."
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