How is the “rule of law” experienced during a political revolution? Focusing on the Egyptian revolution of 2011 and its aftermath, this paper explores how judges and legal activists have negotiated the post-revolutionary landscape, a period characterized by political instability, the securitization of public space, and an aggressive valorization of the “popular will”. While conventional political science methodologies have presented these political formations as incompatible with the rule of law, my research suggests the opposite to be the case. Drawing on more than six months of field work in Cairo and a mix of interviews, media, and court decisions, I show that judicial personnel have developed a repertoire of techniques and rhetorical devices designed to defend a conception of the “rule of law” even in so seemingly inhospitable terrain. My primary focus in this paper is on one judicial technique in particular: the legal technicality. Following Honig (2009) and Comaroff and Comaroff (2011), I define a technicality as a resource present within the law, but, when exploited, negates or transcends the law’s accepted meaning. In postcolonial contexts, where multiple legal traditions and judiciaries occupy the same political space, opportunities for legal technicalities tend to proliferate. As a result, they provide a potent tool for judicial personnel intent on introducing new legal meanings into places where the politics of emergency is ascendant. Understood in this fashion, I show how technicalities have become one of the principle tools of Egypt’s administrative judiciary, the Majlis al-Dawla (State Council). Judges on these courts have heard a number of key post-revolutionary cases, particularly on matters related to the sale of public property, the behavior of government officials, and the scope of executive power. Faced with the difficult task of defending the rule of law amidst extreme popular and political pressure, these judges have intentionally adopted highly technical and tendentious readings of Egyptian law, often relying on procedural “sleight-of-hand” to achieve their preferred results. While this practice is easy to malign or dismiss, I argue that it actually stems from a desire to maintain the rule of law in the face of overwhelming popular pressure. This suggests a much more complex relationship between the “rule of law” and the politics of emergency and revolution than is often assumed, particularly in the judicial politics literature. Thus, this paper helps to uncover signs of law’s adaptability, even in the harshest and least promising of circumstances.

In post- revolutionary Egypt, the judicialization of politics have emerged as one of the most important sites for negotiating the nature and limits of political authority. From adjudication over human rights abuses, the limits of the prerogative powers of the state, and the role of different branches of the government, judges came to play an increasing role in politics. But how is that role different from the pre-revolution period? Does the increased judicialization of politics strengthen the rule of law or does it deter it? This paper argues that judicial politics in post-revolutionary Egypt had been marked by an increasing self- weakening of judiciary. Such a weakening need to be assessed in terms of two distinct logics of that have dominated the relation between government and law that have been in play historically and in contemporary Egypt: the rule of law and state sovereignty. Through an analysis of judiciary politics in Egypt since 2011, this paper charts the roots and reasons behind the weakening of judiciary independence in post-revolutionary Egypt; arguing that the logic of state sovereignty had won over the rule of law as the military and the judiciary formed an alliance to defeat what they perceived as an existential crisis facing the state. The 2013 coup d' etat was a watershed moment where the judiciary scarified its independence in exchange for increased political and professional influence. One major consequence of this had been the weakening of courts as a venue for challenging executive power in Egypt, and the overall triumph of concept of state sovereignty over that of the rule of law.

This paper analyzes aspects of judicial activism in the field of Egyptian personal status law for Muslims. In a country where reform of the current personal status codes is politically fraught, family court judges perform an important semi-legislative task in interpreting and applying the law. Taking this as a point of departure, the paper argues that courts are an important site for exercising Islamic authority and positioning citizens as religious subjects. Among other things, family courts in Egypt contribute to an ongoing discourse on what constitutes the ideal family. In doing so, family court judges help consolidate increasingly hegemonic notions of the nuclear family and conjugal marriage clothed in the Quranic language of mercy and amity (rahma wa mawadda). Thus, contemporary family courts continuously re-inscribe shari‘a in state law and construct its meaning in a way which differs from classical Islamic jurisprudence (fiqh). This tendency has been reinforced by the introduction of computer technology with the stated aim of rationalizing legal practice by making it more uniform. The aforementioned developments in the family courts of Egypt resemble those that have occurred over the past few years in family courts of Tunisia and sharia courts of Malaysia where the same ‘rationalized Islam’ (in the sense of unified and standard) has been found to be at work. The introduction of computerization, which involves the same paragraphs being reproduced over and over through the medium of templates, provides a powerful impetus for the streamlining of judicial practice. However, in the years following the 2011 uprising, individual judges also used the courts as a platform to articulate alternative discourses. In the post-revolutionary environment, they clearly crossed the border between adjudication and legislation by participating in public debate and becoming members of a legislative committee tasked with comprehensive family law reform.This paper analyzes the implications of judicial activism against a background where old and new actors and institutions competed over the right to interpret shari‘a in an authoritative way.

This paper examines continuities and ruptures in the right to change religion or belief since the 2011 Egyptian revolution. It particularly assesses how this right has been articulated in law, administered by bureaucratic agencies, and negotiated by the administrative judiciary. Drawing on case analysis and interviews with litigating attorneys as well as petitioners, the paper situates the changing legality of religious conversion in relation to two ongoing debates. One concerns the protracted conflict between the Coptic Church and the judiciary over how to constitute the legal boundaries of Coptic Orthodoxy. The other concerns the increasing role played by judges as interpreters of the Islamic legal tradition. By charting the complex terrain that governs the movement between religious communities, the paper advances an understanding of the conditions under which the rule of law exacerbates rather than resolves dilemmas of social pluralism.