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 8 identifies the key features of the 'proactivism' of the Chaudhry Court. A fluid and somewhat awkward balance of power appeared to have been reached wherein the military was dominant in some spheres but lacked the capacity to dictate its will wholesale to the other institutional complexes.It also appeared that the political elites and the judiciary had learned from the military’s historical success in safeguarding its institutional interests and were similarly acting coherently and strategically in the furtherance of their respective concerns. The resulting form of ‘corporatist’ governance gave the political system the kind of dynamic equilibrium that it had historically lacked. Given this fragmentation of institutional power, a resurrected Chaudhry Court found the space to engineer the second significant wave of the judicialisation of politics and governance in Pakistan. The judicial review practices entrenched by the court were largely predicated on the three historical strands of legality: namely, formal constitutionalism, administrative law and the review of police powers. The lasting legacy of the Chaudhry Court is a superior judiciary with a seemingly permanent place as a co-equal player in the state structure.

This chapter examines the practice of the constitutional courts in India taking up matters suo motu (on their own initiative) without being petitioned by a claimant or party, to address a situation the judges regard as requiring extraordinary intervention on the part of the court. We assemble the available data about the incidence of this practice of suo motu intervention, its frequency, form, and results. We seek to explain why and how the Indian higher courts engage in this practice, and speculate about the effects of this practice on the courts and on Indian social and political life. For illustrative purposes, we describe the case of a recent intervention initiated by the Supreme Court, in response to a newschapter report of a gang-rape in a village a thousand miles away.

The Indian Supreme Court sits in panels and can have up to 31 judges. This chapter explores how the Indian Supreme Court developed its current structure and the impact of this structure on its functioning. It argues that the Supreme Court’s structure has a range of inter-related effects that includes increasing access to the Court, producing a “polyvocal” jurisprudence that destabilizes stare decisis, spurring experimentation among judges, fostering a “Chief Justice dominant” Court, and reducing the perceived partisanship of judges. Mapping the structure of the Court, as well as the Court’s relationship with the rest of the judiciary, helps us appreciate how judges ultimately interpret the law and the Constitution not in isolation, but within a larger judicial architecture.