Quantitative studies suggest that power sharing institutions promote the emergence of the rule of law in postwar states (Hartzell and Hoddie 2019). On this view, then, and by enhancing ‘the security of actors who constitute part of the apparatus of the state’ and providing ‘a means of checking and balancing government power’ (Hartzell and Hoddie 2019: 643-644), power sharing measures help promote the rule of law – operationalized here as judicial independence. Granular evidence from postwar Lebanon suggests otherwise, however. This paper reconstructs the process by which the judiciary was remade in postwar Lebanon. It then examines the role of the judiciary in 1) the investigation into the 4 August 2020 port explosion and 2) the systemic crisis of the banking sector after the 2019 protests. Both steps help show how power sharing in postwar Lebanon was deployed to preclude any form of accountability and subsequently the emergence of the rule of law. The paper’s argument carries broader theoretical implications: is the variance in the impact of power sharing institutions on the rule of law in postwar contexts a consequence of the type of power sharing deployed, or, alternatively, the different state forms into which power sharing institutions are inserted? Evidence for the paper is sourced from personal interviews with a number of legal experts, plus the available primary and secondary sources.