Egypt Jurisdiction

Why would an entrenched authoritarian regime establish an independent constitutional court empowered to perform judicial review? This dissertation seeks to explain this paradoxical development in Egyptian politics and to understand how the Egyptian Supreme Constitutional Court expanded its authority over a two-decade period making it the single most important avenue for political activists to challenge the state. This paradox is not resolved by the extant comparative and public law literature, which assumes that an expansion of judicial power is impossible without a prior or simultaneou transition to democracy. I find that the regime established an independent constitutional court, capable of providing institutional guarantees on the security of property rights, in order to attract desperately needed private investment after the failure of its socialist-oriented development strategy. Through quantitative and qualitative analysis of court rulings, interviews, and extensive archival research, I examine how the court continued to expand its authority, fundamentally transforming the mode of interaction between state and society, by supporting regime efforts to liberalize the economy while at the same time providing a new forum for opposition activists and human rights groups eager to challenge the state. Finally, I examine how regime retrenchment in the late 1990's successively undermined each of the court's judicial support structures and, ultimately. the court itself. The link between economic transformation, constitutional reforms designed to provide credible commitments to property rights, the consequent opportunities for legal mobilization, and the ultimate collapse of the reform movement generates important new insights for the new institutionalist literature, comparative legal studies on the expansion of judicial power, democratization theory, and social movements theory.