Cambridge Studies in Law and Society: Pakistan's Experience with Formal Law: An Alien Justice

Law reform in Pakistan attracts such disparate champions as the Chief Justice of Pakistan, the 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 displacement' resonant in the literature on South Asia's encounter with colonial law and the region's postcolonial 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 decade. 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'.

Introduction; 1. The hegemony of heritage: the 'narratives of colonial displacement' and the absence of the past in Pakistani reform narratives; 2. Law in practice: the Lahore district courts litigants survey (2010-2011); 3. Law, crime, context and vulnerability: the Punjab crime perception survey (2009-2010); 4. Approaches to legal and judicial reform in Pakistan: postcolonial inertia and the paucity of imagination in times of turmoil and change; 5. Reform on paper: a post-mortem of justice sector reform in Pakistan from 1998-2010; 6. Reform nirvanas and reality checks: justice sector reform in Pakistan in the twenty-first century and the monopoly of the 'experts'; 7. Towards a new approach; Appendices.