Pakistan's Experience With Formal Law

Law Reform in Pakistan attracts such disparate champions as the Chief Justice of Pakistan, USAID, and the Taliban. Common to their equally obsessive pursuit of “speedy justice” is a remarkable obliviousness to the historical, institutional and sociological factors that alienate Pakistanis from their formal legal system. This pioneering book highlights vital and widely neglected linkages between the “narratives of colonial displace-ment” resonant in the literature on South Asia’s encounter with colonial law and the region’s post-colonial official law reform discourses. Against this backdrop, it presents a typology of Pakistani approaches to law reform and critically evaluates the IFI-funded, single-minded pursuit of “efficiency” during the last two decades. Employing diverse methodologies it proceeds to provide empirical support for a widening chasm between popular, at times violently expressed, aspirations for justice and democratically deficient reform designed in distant IFI headquarters that is entrusted to the exclusive and unaccountable Pakistani “reform club.”

OSAMA SIDDIQUE is an independent legal scholar and policy and regulatory reform expert. He has previously worked as a transactional lawyer at two leading US law firms and as an advocate in the Pakistani appellate courts. He also taught for many years at Lahore University of Management Sciences (LUMS) and was the founding Chair of its Law & Policy Department. He was also the inaugural Henry J. Steiner Visiting Professor in Human Rights at Harvard Law School and serves as Senior Faculty for the Institute for Global Law & Policy (IGLP), Harvard Law School workshops. Osama also writes fiction in Urdu and English and has published a novel each in both languages.