FOR a country which is notorious for not following the law, in any manifestation of its practices — constitutional, civic or corporate — we are now faced with a judicial invasion and an onslaught of lawyers and legal opinions in the public sphere. Just one look at Pakistan’s media will underscore this point.
Lawyers and retired judges have taken over the chatter houses known as talk shows on the dozens of television channels which now abound. Much of the discussion is about the NRO, memogate, presidential indemnity, judicial activism, reopening the Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto case, and so on.
It is impossible to read a newspaper today without at least one — or two — articles written by lawyers, and sadly some written by untrained amateurs on legal aspects of which they have no understanding. Even Dawn, the most sacred and dinosauric of public spaces, now has lawyers and advocates writing regular columns about the state of the law and interpreting it for its lay readers. Lawyers writing columns have replaced the retired civil servants and foreign secretaries who wrote pieces no one read, and have gained a new and added respectability as public intellectuals. And huge responsibility, as well.
Of course, the current public mood and acceptance of where the judicial and legal profession and its interlocutors are placed today is based on the events of 2007, the famous lawyers’ movement. Those few months were the period where the legal community was able to resurrect its disputed and tarnished reputation for having been subservient to political authority, particularly when it wore a military uniform.
In the public imagination at least, the judiciary was a major culprit and party to authoritarianism and dictatorial rule in Pakistan. By standing up for its own vested interests — and not directly for democracy, as some wrongly believe — the legal profession was able to show that it could resist authoritarianism. By launching a long and sustained movement for its very own specific institutional rights, a number of lawyers gained deserved fame and rock-star status. The role that the lawyers’ movement played in restoring democracy in Pakistan, was of the nature of unintended consequences.
It is this newfound legitimacy of standing up to a military dictator and of not giving up the fight for their just rights which has made the law and lawyers more respectable, relevant and real to all of us today and has brought them into the public sphere like never before.
The law has always been central to all modern societies, but it is this newly gained prominence and status in Pakistan since 2007 which has been a major transformation, both with regard to the law and lawyers, as well as to the articulation and meaning of this newfound power and authority. A ‘legal paradigm’ has now emerged in Pakistan and is becoming increasingly central to our understanding of political developments and of the nature of the state.
These developments of the last few years have opened up a new sociological field, or paradigm, based on the presence of the law as a structure and as an institution in Pakistan’s political economy. Academics working in and on Pakistan, have built their analysis on a critical appraisal of the role of the state, the military, of governmental actors, and even of the role of political leaders and individuals, all helping to explain one development or another.
Legal decisions have also featured in such understanding, but they have only been based on judgments, seldom anything more. We might now be seeing the emergence of a new field of social science in Pakistan, based on the law, lawyers and judgments.
While recognising that we may have opened up a new field altogether — call it the Legal Field, encompassing a whole host of factors based on law, justice, judges, their decisions, as well as issues of institutions and structures, all embedded in ideology and class — unlike other existing fields, such as that of the state, or social structures or even the military, the legal field has not been theorised at all in Pakistan.
We have academic research which looks at the state, social classes and transitions, gender, ethnicity and most other sociological, economic and political phenomena, but very little on law. Of course, there are numerous references to judgments and decisions, but only that. The legal field has not been analysed as a political, institutional or sociological phenomenon.
Unlike other social sciences in Pakistan, the legal profession does not have its academics or those who can interpret or theorise the law outside of its narrow vision regarding judgments. Law is a highly technical subject, and is best left to lawyers to explain. However, the absence of academics who deal with the laws means that we can expect far more articles by lawyers writing in newspapers about legal judgments and their political impact but few about structural and substantive issues which educate other social scientists.
For the legal field to emerge as a phenomenon on a par with that which exists in political economy, or with regard to gender, or even politics, we await theoreticians and intellectuals to emerge from amongst the lawyers. This wait might just be a very long one.
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