Since 2007, the Supreme Court of Pakistan has emerged as a dominant force in Pakistani politics through its hyper-active use of judicial review, or the power to overrule Parliament’s laws and the Prime Minister’s acts. This hyper-activism was on display during the Supreme Court’s unilateral disqualification of Prime Minister Yousef Raza Gilani in 2012 under the leadership of Chief Justice Iftikhar Chaudhry. Despite the Supreme Court’s practical adoption of restraint subsequent to the retirement of Chief Justice Chaudhry in 2013, the Court has once again disqualified a prime minister, Nawaz Sharif, due to allegations of corruption in 2017. While many critics have focused on the substance of the Court’s decisions in these cases, sufficient focus is not paid to the amorphous case-selection process of the Supreme Court of Pakistan. In order to compare the relatively unregulated process of case-selection in Pakistan to the more structured processes utilized by the Supreme Courts of the United States’ and India, this book aims to understand the historical roots of judicial review in each country dating back to the colonial era extending through the foundational period of each nation impacting present-day jurisprudence. As a first in its kind, this study comparatively examines these periods of history in order to contextualize a practical prescription to standardize the case-selection process in the Supreme Court of Pakistan in a way that retains the Court’s overall power while limiting its involvement in purely political issues. This publication offers a critical and comparative view of the Supreme Court of Pakistan’s recent involvement in political disputes due to the lack of a discerning case-selection system that has otherwise been adopted by the Supreme Courts of India and the United States’ to varying degrees. It will be of interest to academics in the fields of Asian Law, South Asian Politics and Law and Comparative Law.

This book examines constitutional law and practice in five South Asian countries: India, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, Nepal, and Bangladesh.

Over the last two decades courts have become major players in the political landscape in Asia. This book assesses what is driving this apparent trend toward judicialization in the region. It looks at the variations within the judicialization trend, and how these variations affect political practice and policy outcomes. The book goes on to examine how this new trend is affecting aspects of the rule of law, democratic governance and state-society relations. It investigates how the experiences in Asia add to the debate on the judicialization of politics globally; in particular how judicial behaviour in Asia differs from that in the West, and the implications of the differences on the theoretical debate.

Through a detailed historical and empirical account of post-independence years, this book offers a new assessment of the role of the judiciary in Pakistani politics. Instead of seeing the judiciary as helpless or struggling against an authoritarian state, it argues that the judiciary has been a crucial link in the creation of state and political inequality in Pakistan. This rubs against the central role given to the judiciary in developing countries to fix the ‘corrupt politicians and stubborn bureaucracies’ in the World Bank’s ‘Good Governance’ paradigm and rule of law initiatives. It also challenges the contemporary legal and judicial discourse that extols the virtues of Public Interest Litigation. While the book’s core analysis is a critique of the contemporary liberal legal project, it also adds to the critical tradition of social theory by linking political economy to a social theory of law. The theoretical aspect of the study is applicable to any developing society whose judiciary is going through foreign-sponsored ‘rule of law’ judicial reforms.

Presents a deeply contextualized account of public law and judicial review in Pakistan.

This book is a comprehensive study of Pakistan's judicial history since Independence. It includes detailed discussion of the act, lives, and judgments of significant Pakistani judges, with their continuing effects on the life of the nation.

In countries and supranational entities around the globe, constitutional reform has transferred an unprecedented amount of power from representative institutions to judiciaries. The constitutionalization of rights and the establishment of judicial review are widely believed to have benevolent and progressive origins, and significant redistributive, power-diffusing consequences. Ran Hirschl challenges this conventional wisdom. Drawing upon a comprehensive comparative inquiry into the political origins and legal consequences of the recent constitutional revolutions in Canada, Israel, New Zealand, and South Africa, Hirschl shows that the trend toward constitutionalization is hardly driven by politicians' genuine commitment to democracy, social justice, or universal rights. Rather, it is best understood as the product of a strategic interplay among hegemonic yet threatened political elites, influential economic stakeholders, and judicial leaders. This self-interested coalition of legal innovators determines the timing, extent, and nature of constitutional reforms. Hirschl demonstrates that whereas judicial empowerment through constitutionalization has a limited impact on advancing progressive notions of distributive justice, it has a transformative effect on political discourse. The global trend toward juristocracy, Hirschl argues, is part of a broader process whereby political and economic elites, while they profess support for democracy and sustained development, attempt to insulate policymaking from the vicissitudes of democratic politics.

The power of national and transnational constitutional courts to issue binding rulings in interpreting the constitution or an international treaty has been endlessly discussed. What does it mean for democratic governance that non-elected judges influence politics and policies? The authors of Judicial Power - legal scholars, political scientists, and judges - take a fresh look at this problem. To date, research has concentrated on the legitimacy, or the effectiveness, or specific decision-making methods of constitutional courts. By contrast, the authors here explore the relationship among these three factors. This book presents the hypothesis that judicial review allows for a method of reflecting on social integration that differs from political methods, and, precisely because of the difference between judicial and political decision-making, strengthens democratic governance. This hypothesis is tested in case studies on the role of constitutional courts in political transformations, on the methods of these courts, and on transnational judicial interactions.

The political history of Pakistan is characterised by incomplete constitution-making, a process which has placed the burden of constitutional interpretation on state instruments ranging from the bureaucracy to the military to the judiciary. In a penetrating and original study of the relationship between state and civil society in Pakistan, Paula Newberg demonstrates how the courts have influenced constitutional development and the structure of the state. By examining judicial decisions, particularly those made at times of political crisis, she considers how tensions within the judiciary, and between courts and other state institutions, have affected the ways political society views itself, and explores the consequences of these debates for the formal organisation of political power.

Judicializing Everything? focuses on judicial decision-making in parliamentary states that have recently adopted bills of rights.