As Pakistan emerged from military rule upon the death of General Zia in a plane crash in 1988, it underwent a new governmental experience marked by tussles between unsettled elected governments, a constitutionally empowered civilian presidency and a military establishment that covertly exercised considerable power. Chapter 6 unveils how the superior courts utilised the available political space to engineer a dramatic expansion of public law and carved a role for themselves as an important institution of the state. As the civil state’s machinery became the turf of power struggles, safeguarding its independence and ensuring its rule-boundedness emerged as a key pillar of the superior courts’ Writ jurisdiction. The superior courts also began to develop a more robust jurisprudence of rule of law and fundamental rights, while the Supreme Court utilised its Original jurisdiction for the first time to institute Public Interest Litigation. Nonetheless, recurrent involvement in matters of pure politics and governmental change resulted in direct confrontations between the judiciary and elected governments, and ultimately the politicisation of judicial review.

Chapter 5 highlights the emergence of a distinctly praetorian governmentality in the next cycle of military rule in the 1980s. Having displaced an elected government, the military regime of General Zia ul Haq (1977–88) set about the task of refining the blueprint for military rule. What was distinctive, however, about this form of praetorian governmentality as compared to the earlier period of military rule was the hegemonic ideation of political legitimacy predicated on religion. The military regime visibly embarked on the agenda of 'Islamising' the constitution and the laws. New Shariat courts were given unprecedented powers of judicial review of legislation for conformity with Islamic law at the same time that the fundamental rights provisions of the Constitution remained under suspension, and the superior courts’ Writ jurisdiction was incapacitated. Nonetheless, Islamisation also enabled the superior courts to re-orient their public law jurisprudence and to bolster their legitimacy. Pakistan’s appellate courts learnt to capitalise on this new rhetoric and restructured a more assertive form of judicial review grounded in the normative bedrock of Islamic legality.