After the 2011 Moroccan constitution for the first time stipulated that judges are allowed to form associations (Article 111), Moroccan judges began to organise and establish the country’s first independent judges club (nādī al-quḍāt). Approximately 2900 judges have joined the club so far. This raises questions about what motivates judges to organise and what kind of change they want to see implemented. Also, what is the club likely to achieve? Since its creation, the club has called for the establishment of an independent judiciary and has held multiple sit-ins to give weight to its demands and to protest against the executive’s heavy hand in the judiciary and more specifically against the tutelage of the Moroccan Ministry of Justice. This paper argues that the establishment of the club, most of whose members are in their thirties and forties, is partly an expression of a generational conflict within the judicial establishment. These younger judges challenge existing patterns of authority within the judiciary and wider Moroccan society. Similarly to the Arab Spring protests material deprivation and a perceived lack of dignity also motivate judges to organise. The club has asked to improve judges’ material conditions to make them less prone to corruption. Members want to re-establish the “reputation of the judiciary” which is commonly perceived as corrupt and inefficient; they thereby try to re-establish their own reputation and dignity. While it is quite possible that the club will achieve some internal reforms of the judiciary regarding training methods, promotion patterns, an increase in salaries, and a reform of the curriculum, it is unlikely that the club will achieve the establishment of a completely independent judiciary, because the judges club has so far not questioned the executive role of the monarchy within the judiciary. Members of the club acknowledge the king as the central figure of Moroccan politics and view the monarch as part of the solution, not the problem. Accordingly, they have asked for the implementation of Article 107 of the constitution that stipulates that the king guarantees the independence of the judiciary. Therefore, change in the short term will likely reshape the relationship between the judiciary and the Ministry of Justice, but will not affect the monarchy’s heavy hand in the judicial system.

Who are the dissident prosecutors and judges of Syria? The word dissident used here refers to “a person who opposes official policy, especially that of an authoritarian state”. And Syria as ruled by Bashar al-Assad is an authoritarian state. Why have the dissident judges and prosecutors, a majority of them men, but also some women, defected? How have they organised themselves to actively oppose the regime while attempting to provide judicial services to a population under siege? There are a number of associations that were formed locally: the Judges’ Club (July 2012), the Free Judicial Council (September 2012), the Integrated Judicial Council of Aleppo and the Sharia Council of Aleppo (December 2012), the Independent Judicial Council (February 2013), the Higher Judicial Institute of Syria (February 2013), the Free and Independent Judicial Council (May 2013), and finally the Ministry of Justice of the Syrian Interim Government of the National Coalition (November 2013). Though their common enemy is Bashar al-Assad and his supporters, there exists a certain amount of discord as to what laws should rule Syria and who should apply them. How have the initial objectives of these dissident associations changed? What comprises have their members been obliged to make in the name of unity? In addition to dissident prosecutors and judges, there are dissident courts, that is to say non-state courts established by opponents to the regime. Most of these courts are located in the northern part of Syria, in regions called the “liberated zones”. Who administers these dissident courts and appoints its judges and staff? Who sits on these courts and which laws are applied in these courts? Many of the dissident courts have chosen to apply draft laws of the Arab League based on Islamic law, al-Sharia. Why have they decided to apply al-Sharia, albeit in its modern form of codified law? How does one explain this revival of al-Sharia? These are some of the questions the presentation will answer. The main sources for this paper are Internet sources: the Facebook accounts, and websites of dissident individuals and groups; YouTube videos posted by members of the judiciary announcing their defection and showing how the dissident courts function; official documents of the Syrian government posted on the Web; interviews, news reports and bulletins of satellite news channels, dissident news websites and blogs.

When does law enhance sociopolitical stability versus provide openings for change in diverse, highly-globalized societies such as those of the Arab Gulf? With the importance of legal accountability and rights as one of the slogans invoked during the Arab uprising period of 2011, and the pressures for stabilization and retrenchment in the MENA since then, this question takes on added complexity and significance. Indeed, the array of domestic and transnational forces significant for legal politics in the Arab Gulf suggests contingent answers regarding the roles for law in balancing change and stability. This paper focuses on legal actors and their views of the rule of law. It uses original data from a large, multi-year grant project to provide rich responses on how and when legal actors and norms intersect with patterns of sociopolitical change and stabilization in two Gulf states, Qatar and Kuwait. The paper looks specifically at three issues -- what diverse legal actors understand to be the core purposes and sources of the rule of law, how legal norms work in practice, and how legal education influences the growth and evolution of the legal system. These issues are analyzed using specific data from several hundred short surveys of students and several dozen longer interviews with legal practitioners from the two countries. A major argument for the paper is that the range of ideas and strategies for legal actors to embrace, interpret and engage in with respect to the outcome of whether their work serves to move social change, stabilization, or both, is sufficiently variable so that both political ideology and praxis matter a great deal. Specifically, domestic perceptions, and strategic deployment, of international law and shari’a as legal symbols of global, possibly neocolonial norms, and internal legitimacy, respectively, form an important field of contestation with respect to law’s power to put pressure on or buttress sociopolitical norms. How can legal actors in Qatar, Kuwait and similar societies navigate political cleavages around sources of global and domestic legal legitimation to foster a balanced sense of reform amid hyperglobalized growth? One tentative answer from the rich research data would seem to be in moving beyond the symbolic deployment of legal sources to build hybrid spaces for legal dialogue and compromise, as occur to some extent in the higher educational and policy spheres in both countries.

Young Kuwaiti women have succeeded in becoming certified lawyers at a remarkable rate in the past decade. In the late 1980s, 20 women were registered as law students at the Faculty of Law at Kuwait University. In 1999, 120 women and 60 men were students. The latest available data for the academic year 2012/13 indicates 2,520 registered students of which 1520 are women and 990 are men. The upsurge of female lawyers in Kuwait impacts on societal pressures for reforms that bolster female citizenship in three ways: First, Kuwaiti women seek out female lawyers to a larger degree than male lawyers in order to get legal advice and/or raise a case in court, particularly in matters related to family law. This trend makes female lawyers more acquainted with the daily problems that women share compared with their male colleagues. Secondly, many female lawyers are observant Muslims who are confident enough to interpret religious law tenets, and argue for principles of justice within an Islamic jurisprudence framework in ways that challenge traditional interpretations and judicial practice. Finally, female lawyers have become active participants and leaders of different committees (such as the human rights committee) at the Kuwait Lawyers Association (KLA, est. 1963). They constitute potential agents of change in pushing for further reforms in gendered state laws, particularly pertaining to issues regarding family law (where the principle of male guardianship limits the autonomy of female citizens with regards to marriage, divorce and custody of children), nationality law (where Kuwaiti women married to non-Kuwaitis do not share equal civil rights as Kuwaiti men married to non-Kuwaitis), and housing law (where state law premises that only males can register as heads of households, Kuwaiti women are not entitled to register as heads of household, a practice that curbs and limits Kuwaiti women’s access to a range of social and economic rights, particularly in times of destitute if they divorce, get widowed, or experience financial hardship following marriage with non-Kuwaitis). Based on interviews with Kuwaiti female lawyers in the past three years, the paper argues that a young generation of female lawyers is breaking new grounds as professionals. Assertive female lawyers are also currently pushing for strengthened female autonomy within state laws, thereby challenging the patriarchal social order through their daily work as practitioners, and by way of mobilization through the KLA.