This chapter examines how the Chinese Communist Party restructured the judicial bureaucracy to insulate the normative state from local prerogative interference. It analyzes two key institutional reforms: the recentralization of court personnel and budget authority at the provincial level, and the introduction of judicial accountability mechanisms that emphasized individual responsibility over hierarchical oversight. These reforms aimed to curtail local protectionism, rent-seeking, and extrajudicial intervention by strengthening vertical discipline and professionalizing frontline adjudication. While they marked a significant departure from the locally embedded judiciary of the pre-Xi era, their success was uneven across regions and constrained by enduring informal practices. The chapter argues that institutional design played an important role in carving out a more autonomous legal space within the authoritarian state, even if that space remained contingent and selectively realized in practice.

This chapter situates China under Xi Jinping as a paradigmatic case of legal dualism. It begins by tracing the deep institutional embeddedness of courts in the pre-2012 era and examines how concerns over social stability drove widespread extrajudicial intervention. It then analyzes Xi’s unprecedented political centralization, which restructured center–local relations and created the conditions for judicial reform. Engaging ongoing scholarly debates over whether these reforms signal a “turn toward law” or reinforce courts as order-maintenance tools, the chapter introduces the dual state framework as a more productive alternative. It argues that China’s current legal configuration aims to institutionalize a dual state – enhancing judicial professionalism and autonomy in routine matters while maintaining Party control over politically salient cases.

Integrating algorithmic tools into judicial systems prompts critical questions on public trust, due process, and fairness, alongside inherent risks of the pursuit of ‘technical fix’. In response to growing demands for transparency and consistency, Taiwan has introduced algorithmic and AI-powered sentencing tools, representing significant steps toward reforming sentencing practices and improving judicial accountability. However, their implementation has encountered formidable challenges, including low adoption rates, judicial misunderstandings, algorithmic biases, and insufficient regulatory frameworks. This chapter explores these issues within Taiwan’s historical and legal context, providing an in-depth analysis of empirical data and judicial practices. By situating Taiwan’s experience within the global discourse on AI in judicial systems, the chapter illuminates the complexities of integrating AI into a civil law tradition while striving to maintain judicial independence. Taiwan’s approach offers insights for jurisdictions worldwide, contributing to broader discussions on leveraging AI to enhance justice without compromising foundational legal principles and values.

Despite the Chinese government’s efforts to privatize infrastructure construction through the public-private partnership (PPP) market, the majority of investors in this sector are still state-owned enterprises (SOEs). Moreover, the government that contracts for the infrastructure construction and service usually holds a significant proportion of shares in PPP projects. This chapter explains this phenomenon using the legal theory of SOEs. It finds that, in practice, the government typically retains the power to terminate PPP projects in the public interest when new circumstances arise, while the courts offer limited protection to private investors. As a result, private investors may be deterred from investing due to concerns about government opportunism. Furthermore, it observes that a judicial reform enhancing the independence of judges is associated with an increase in the proportion of shares held by private investors and a decline in shares held by SOEs and local governments. These findings suggest that a robust legal system promotes the extent of privatization by boosting the confidence of private investors.

This chapter highlights the centrality of the rule of law to Khatami’s presidential campaign. It then reviews the policies of the heads of the judiciary in the post-Khomeini era, with the most far-reaching reform initiatives occurring during the tenure of Shahroudi (1999–2009). These included trying to phase out special courts, prohibiting the security services from running their own detention and prison systems, ending the death penalty for minors, ending execution by stoning, strengthening the rights of political prisoners, and reforming the Penal Code and the Code of Criminal Procedure. Many of these were reversed or watered down by Sadegh Larijani, head of the judiciary 2009–2019. Ebrahim Raisi (2019-2021) revived some of Shahroudi’s reforms in sentencing and also inaugurated a concerted effort to fight corruption in the judiciary. The chapter illustrates that the judiciary is not a monolith, and much of the quality of the rule of law stands and falls with its leading administrators and professionals.

The rule of law and judicial independence are a project yet to be achieved in Mozambique. The different attempts made so far to reform the legal system, mainly after the change in political and strategic direction brought about by the Constitution of 1990, were always short-sighted and conjunctural in nature, under domestic and foreign pressure that was not always clear or well-intentioned. Real structural reforms need to be made for the judiciary to be able to affirm itself as a real power and, in this way, favour balanced growth of companies, increased productivity, investment and jobs and, at the same time, the defence of the rights and legitimate interests of individuals and groups with fewer economic resources.

In the Middle East and North Africa region, laws organising the judiciary and bilateral agreements on judicial cooperation expressly permit the use of foreign judges on domestic courts. Judicial ‘secondments’ of this type allow host courts to deal with increasing caseloads expeditiously, while providing shadow-training for domestic judges in the long term. This chapter outlines the practice of sharing judges in the region and describes how foreign judges serve on domestic courts in Bahrain, Kuwait, Qatar and the United Arab Emirates, in law and practice. Using the lens of political economy, the analysis highlights two trends in the region. The first is the recruitment of foreign judges to fill skills and knowledge-based gaps among domestic judiciaries. The second is the high degree of executive control over the movement of judges, in both sending and receiving states, with implications for the separation of powers, judicial independence and executive accountability.

This chapter examines the appointment of foreign judges through the lens of political contestation and potential judicial interference in Botswana, Lesotho and Eswatini. It first interrogates why the appointment of foreign judges continued after domestic pipelines of judges had increased. Adopting a regime-based approach, the chapter first argues that the continued appointment of foreign judges beyond functional necessity is a form of strategic policy drift, because it does not require a new policy and it may be couched in positive or populist terms. Second, this chapter examines the timing of the pivot away from the appointment of foreign judges in Botswana and Eswatini. It shows that judicial leadership combined with local demand plays an important role in the timing of change, but that the localisation of appointments to apex courts of appeal, without reform of the appointment process itself, provides democratic window dressing for hegemonic regimes. The rhetoric around citizen-based localisation (Botswana) or racially-based Africanisation (Eswatini) has a populist flavour which may provide cover for varying degrees of autocratic behaviours.

The high European judiciaries from Strasbourg, to Luxembourg, to Paris have become powerful institutional actors whose authority has moved past the interpretive, to the normative, to the political, and to the constitutional levels. At the very moment, however, that the judiciary blossoms into a full-fledged institution of government, it must find some new way to construct its legitimacy. This chapter thus sketches out two case studies that offer different, yet related, attempts to reconstruct judicial legitimacy in contemporary Europe. The first focuses on the judicial appointments reforms concerning the Court of Justice of the European Union and the European Court of Human Rights. The second turns to ongoing debates concerning the use of judicial analytics, the reform of the traditional French mode of composing judicial decisions, and other measures designed to increase access to French judicial reasoning. In a long series of interlocking reforms, both the French and European high courts have managed to further increase their already burgeoning clout.

The introduction of the book has two purposes. First, it explains why a normative theory of ECJ procedural and organisational law is needed. It puts forward three reasons: first, procedural and organisational design involves making important choices on the role of courts in society; second, the dominant normative approach to assessing the ECJ’s work, namely the focus on its methods of interpretation, faces a number of conceptual problems; and third, ECJ judicial reform is of great practical relevance and requires normative anchoring. Secondly, the introduction explains the empirical strategies the book pursues to investigate the ECJ’s inner workings. In particular, it explains how requests for access to adminstrative documents and statistical analysis is used in the book to get a better understanding how the ECJ’s procedural and organisational rules are applied in practice. Finally, the introduction summarises the core of the book’s argument.

To what extent are employees in the Mexican judiciary – both judges and lower level officials – connected by family ties? Are these family connections used inappropriately to hire or to favor relatives in ways that would not have been possible absent the family connection? This chapter takes advantage of a unique dataset to answer these questions. It documents a departure from the promise made in the judicial reform of 1994, that by removing the administration of the judiciary from the Supreme Court and transferring it to a judicial council, a professional and meritocratic judicial career would be established for all federal judges, making merit and not connections the main determinants of becoming a judge. The sheer magnitude and pervasiveness of family relationships within the Mexican federal judiciary conspicuously show the limitationsof this reform and highlight the challenges Mexico faces to consolidate judicial careers.

The Commission against Impunity in Guatemala was an unprecedented international partnership to build the rule of law in a weak state. Between 2007 and 2019, the CICIG contributed to important legal reforms, the creation of a specialized prosecutor’s office and “high-risk” courts, and investigations of more than sixty criminal networks before being shut down by a president whom it was investigating. The CICIG’s sponsorship by the United Nations and funding from international donors helped it to survive resistance from successive Guatemalan presidents. As the CICIG’s investigations and a stronger Guatemalan state threatened a broader array of previously untouchable powerful domestic actors – including in business, the military, and politics – domestic opposition became more obstructionist. The backlash against the CICIG was ultimately successful when an under-resourced and fragile pro-reform domestic coalition could not replace the international support that had lessened as a result of independent but simultaneous global political trends in the late 2010s. The CICIG experience suggests that rule of law reformers will struggle with backlash from those actors who would lose power and face punishment in a strengthened state and that backlash may be insurmountable as international allies move on.