Through a focus on Singapore, this book presents an analysis of authoritarian legalism, showing how prosperity, public discourse, and a rigorous observance of legal procedure enable a reconfigured rule of law - liberal form but illiberal content. It shows how institutions and process become tools to constrain dissenting citizens while protecting those in political power.

Provides an intra-Asia comparative perspective of authoritarian legality, with a focus on formation, development, transition and post-transition stages.

Scholars have generally assumed that courts in authoritarian states are pawns of their regimes, upholding the interests of governing elites and frustrating the efforts of their opponents. As a result, nearly all studies in comparative judicial politics have focused on democratic and democratizing countries. This volume brings together leading scholars in comparative judicial politics to consider the causes and consequences of judicial empowerment in authoritarian states. It demonstrates the wide range of governance tasks that courts perform, as well as the way in which courts can serve as critical sites of contention both among the ruling elite and between regimes and their citizens. Drawing on empirical and theoretical insights from every major region of the world, this volume advances our understanding of judicial politics in authoritarian regimes.

A striking new analysis of Myanmar's court system, revealing how the rule of law is 'lexically present but semantically absent'.

This volume explores the form and function of constitutions in countries without the fully articulated institutions of limited government.

In countries around the world, from the United States to the Philippines to Chile, police forces are at the center of social unrest and debates about democracy and rule of law. This book examines the persistence of authoritarian policing in Latin America to explain why police violence and malfeasance remain pervasive decades after democratization. It also examines the conditions under which reform can occur. Drawing on rich comparative analysis and evidence from Brazil, Argentina, and Colombia, the book opens up the 'black box' of police bureaucracies to show how police forces exert power and cultivate relationships with politicians, as well as how social inequality impedes change. González shows that authoritarian policing persists not in spite of democracy but in part because of democratic processes and public demand. When societal preferences over the distribution of security and coercion are fragmented along existing social cleavages, politicians possess few incentives to enact reform.

This book addresses the question of why governments sometimes follow the law and other times choose to evade the law. The traditional answer of jurists has been that laws have an autonomous causal efficacy: law rules when actions follow anterior norms; the relation between laws and actions is one of obedience, obligation, or compliance. Contrary to this conception, the authors defend a positive interpretation where the rule of law results from the strategic choices of relevant actors. Rule of law is just one possible outcome in which political actors process their conflicts using whatever resources they can muster: only when these actors seek to resolve their conflicts by recourse to la, does law rule. What distinguishes 'rule-of-law' as an institutional equilibrium from 'rule-by-law' is the distribution of power. The former emerges when no one group is strong enough to dominate the others and when the many use institutions to promote their interest.

Using interviews, newspaper articles, online texts, official documents, and national surveys, Lei shows that the development of the public sphere in China has provided an unprecedented forum for citizens to organize, influence the public agenda, and demand accountability from the government.

Tying the Autocrat's Hands provides a comprehensive, empirical evaluation of legal reforms in contemporary China. Based on the author's extensive fieldwork and analyses of original data, the book tells a story in which foreign investors with weak political connections push for judicial empowerment in China, while Chinese investors struggle to hold on to their privileges.

This book uncovers how colonial administrators, postcolonial governments and international aid agencies have promoted stability and their own visions of the rule of law in Sudan.