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.