Chapter 3 charts the consolidation of judicial review during the first period of direct and indirect martial rule under the Ayub regime (1958–1968). Despite the military–bureaucratic authoritarianism of the Ayub era and the judicial validation of Martial Law, the courts managed to preserve the judicial review of bureaucratic action. The exercise of the Writ jurisdiction aligned with the priorities of a Martial Law regime that was attempting to subdue and co-opt a hitherto powerful bureaucracy. In the post-Martial Law phase, the promulgation of the 1962 Constitution provided the courts with the basis to consolidate the foundations of the Writ jurisdiction along three axes – formal constitutionalism, administrative law and procedural safeguards against the abuse of public order and state security laws – which have remained at the core of the superior courts’ definition of rule of law in the decades since.

In addition to providing an overview of the book and its methodological orientation, the introductory chapter highlights three key facets of constitutionalism in Pakistan. Firstly, it is through the consistent development of the judicial review of administrative action, even under military rule, that Pakistan’s superior courts have acquired the power to mediate inter-state tensions. Secondly, the courts’ increasing capacity to mediate state–society dialectics – arising out of the demands of various groups and classes on the periphery of the state – also had much of its basis in the judicial review of executive action. Thirdly, Pakistan’s courts strategically re-situated themselves from time to time and re-fashioned their role in accordance with fundamental shifts in constitutional politics, state structure and state-society dialectics charted in this book.

This chapter treats the decisions in The Quartet of cases not as individual contributions to judicial-review doctrine but rather as a sign of significantly increasing judicial activism in public law. The decade of The Quartet - the 1960s - was one of rapid de-colonialisation in the British Empire. Through a consideration of the development of judicial control of the executive in various countries that emerged into post-colonialism in the course of the twentieth century - notably Pakistan, Myanmar, Hong Kong, Malaysia, Singapore, Malawi, Tanzania, Uganda, Kenya and South Africa - the chapter seeks to illuminate, in a very preliminary way, the public-law legacy of British colonialism, and the ongoing states of relations between the judiciary and the executive in common-law jurisdictions of the ‘Global South’. Finally, the chapter draws out from the jurisdictional analysis a number of common themes and issues such as the role of the Privy Council and of written constitutions.