Chapter 1 of 'Roads to the Rule of Law: The Emergence of an Independent Judiciary in Contemporary Egypt'

Abstract

This is the first chapter of Roads to the Rule of Law: The Emergence of an Independent Judiciary in Contemporary Egypt, a PhD dissertation accepted by MIT's Department of Political Science in 1995. The dissertation's abstract is below: The dissertation documents and explains the increasing ability of the Egyptian judiciary to limit the executive's violation of citizens' civil rights. The theoretical problem of the thesis is understanding why the state would submit itself to the rule of law and hence limit its discretionary power. This is especially puzzling in the absence of significant social pressure for political liberalization. The dissertation shows that the re-emergence of the judiciary as a powerful actor in Egypt is a result of presidential attempts to restrain the influence of rival powerful institutions such as the military and security forces, as well as create a more effective monitoring system over the lower rungs of the public bureaucracy. The thesis then shows that the judiciary was able to exploit the presidency's dependence upon it to expand its power and expand the realm of rights effectively protected. This further augmented the judiciary's power by creating allies in civil society that have increasingly formed a constituency supportive of the judiciary.