Authoritarian regimes come in many varieties, but their common characteristics are an illiberal disregard for rule-of-law norms and limited executive accountability to society, which ranges from circumscribed to nonexistent. However, indifference or hostility to the rule of law does not negate the fact that many authoritarian regimes place great stock in rule by law. Show trials, for example, provide a forum to parade “repentant” subversives, thereby reinforcing the hegemony of the ruling ideology, justifying elaborate surveillance to ferret out dangerous elements, and publicizing political crimes. Military tribunals and security courts used in the context of war or a state of siege “judicialize” the elimination of enemies of the regime (whether foreign or domestic) through imprisonment or court-ordered execution. Such courts also serve, in some contexts, as a firewall to shield civilian courts and the due process rights they afford to “nonenemies.” Even constitutional courts—the prototypical institutional base for the rule of law—can service authoritarianism when judges validate a regime's repression and violence as legal or, alternatively, as nonjusticiable.

The essays in Rule by Law, together, provide rich comparative analysis of the legal, judicial, and social dynamics of authoritarianism in a dozen countries, with examples from many more. Since so little previous work has been done on judicial politics in nondemocracies, the collection is an important intervention for dispelling the misconception that courts in such regimes serve as mere pawns. Rather, many of the contributors substantiate the point that our conception of “law” must be broad enough to accommodate authoritarian legalities, and that our analysis of courts must be attenuated to apprehend the varied ways in which judiciaries operate within illiberal contexts. Even the United States, under the Bush administration, adopted illiberal policies of warrantless spying and interrogational torture, and established patently authoritarian military commissions to prosecute terror suspects. These commissions were canceled when President Barack Obama took office in 2009, but the delay in establishing an alternative is an example of the challenges facing governments that seek to reliberalize the rule of law.

The volume's analytical structure and main lines of inquiry, laid out in the introduction by the coeditors, build on Tamir Moustafa's earlier conceptual work on the “judicialization of authoritarian politics” in Egypt. Egyptian authoritarianism and judicial politics offer an “ideal” model because they manifest so many of the patterns and practices found in settings around the world, including an evolving authoritarianism from charismatic leadership (Gamal Abdel Nasser) to dynastic succession (Hosni Mubarak and his heir-apparent son); a protracted state of emergency and the use of security courts to prosecute members of groups whose ideologies and activities are deemed menacing to the regime; the sway of Cold War politics, from Soviet client to Western neoliberal supplicant; and the use of constitutional and other courts to, variously, assuage the nationalization-risk anxieties of potential investors, control corruption by lower-level bureaucrats, and varnish national laws with Islamic legitimacy. But the Egyptian case also exemplifies the possibilities that courts can function as sites of resistance; Egyptian judges have picked their battles, but in some instances have ruled in ways that promote liberal agendas contradictory to the interests and goals of the regime.

Three chapters focus on right-wing authoritarian regimes in the Southern Cone. Anthony Pereira (Chapter 1) presents a comparative study of security courts in Brazil, Chile, and Argentina. Brazilian proceedings were, relatively, the most public and adversarial, and convictions could be appealed to the civilian Supreme Court. In Chile, security courts enabled the military to monopolize “political” cases and also insulated the civilian judiciary. Argentina made the least use of security courts; only one person was tried for every 71 who were “disappeared” (i.e., extrajudicially detained and executed). Pereira argues that these differences can be explained by “differing degrees of integration and consensus between judicial and military elites” prior to the military takeovers, as well as differing dynamics among the national legal system, defense lawyers and civil society groups (p. 29). Because Brazil's security courts were a civilian–military hybrid, of the three countries it had the least “reformist backlash” and, thus, retained elements of authoritarian legality following the political transition.

Lisa Hilbink (Chapter 4) elaborates on the Chilean case, explaining that courts never challenged the undemocratic, illiberal and antilegal policies of the regime because the institutional structure and ideology of the judiciary is grounded in the ideal of judicial apoliticism; to intervene by accepting habeas petitions or to protest the use of torture would have been seen as acting “politically.” Robert Barros (Chapter 6) compares “judicial failure” in Chile and Argentina. While courts were complicit in the reigns of terror in both countries, he offers an institutional explanation: Because military rule was presented as a temporary exception and regimes ceased to accept legality as a binding constraint, rule of law remedies designed for “normal” times were unavailable “out of context,” and civilian jurisprudence served to validate the space of dictatorial prerogative (p. 171).

Peter Solomon (Chapter 10) traces the transformations in authoritarianism and judicial politics in Russia from the late Tsarist period through the post-Soviet era. The emancipation of serfs created elite social pressures for stronger laws and courts in the interest of “power preservation” (p. 264). Following the Bolshevik revolution of 1917, Lenin embraced an instrumental conception of law to serve the new regime. Even during the Stalin era, courts played an important role in the regulation of Soviet federalism and maintenance of social control, although there was no pretense that the leader could be constrained by law. The 1977 Constitution provided new legal rights for citizens, but they did not bear fruit until the expansion of judicial review during the Gorbachev era. Solomon interprets the struggles for power leading up to the collapse of the USSR through the lens of judicial politics, notably Boris Yeltsin's use of judicial reform as one means to assert autonomy for the Russian republic. Under Vladimir Putin and his successor, Russian rule is now best described as “competitive authoritarian,” with renewed concentration of power in the hands of the executive.

In semiauthoritarian Turkey, as Hootan Shambayati (Chapter 11) explains, one aim of the two military coups (1960 and 1980) was to protect national secularism against societal pressures for expanding religious rights. Each military regime imposed a new constitution before stepping down, empowering the judiciary to review decisions of Parliament, thus intensifying Turkey's bifurcated political system in which “the state” (security establishment, presidency, and judiciary) can legally restrain “the government” (i.e., Parliament and the Cabinet). Democracy has been thwarted repeatedly, with the support of political elites, by the judicial outlawing of ruling parties deemed to be insufficiently secular. The Islamic Republic of Iran has a similarly bifurcated system, although in that case, as Shambayati explains, it is the enforcement, rather than exclusion, of religion that gives rise to restrictions on democracy by the unelected Supreme Leader and the Council of Guardians.

Every chapter of this book makes an analytically sophisticated argument about authoritarianism and law. Since more than half of all states can be characterized as authoritarian or semiauthoritarian, this volume provides frames of analysis and empirical examples that can stimulate and guide future research, and move the study of judicial politics in exciting new directions.