Judicial institutions, the legitimacy of Islamic state law and democratic transition in Egypt: Can a shift toward a common law model of adjudication improve the prospects of a successful democratic transition?
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Egyptian law has undergone radical institutional change over the last 150 years, evolving from a decentralized system of largely uncodified Islamic law, into a highly centralized, positivist system modeled along the civil law system of France. The last quarter of the nineteenth century witnessed the wholesale adoption of European law, including the Napoleonic Code. After regaining independence, however, the Egyptian legal system has been steadily attempting to re-Islamize itself, beginning with the Sanhuri Code that replaced the Napoleonic Code in 1949 and the adoption of Article 2 in the Constitution in 1980 recognizing the Shari’a as the source of legislation for the Egyptian state. This article contrasts the jurisprudence of Egypt’s Supreme Constitutional Court (SCC) construing the meaning of “shari’a” with the practice of ordinary Egyptian courts construing Egypt’s civil code. It argues that the SCC has been able to garner a relatively high degree of legitimacy than the Sanhuri Code because its practice in construing the “shari’a” in constitutional challenges requires it to adopt common law style reasoning, while the ordinary courts are dominated by a positivist outlook on law which undermines its ability to claim Islamic legitimacy. This article argues that a broader shift to a common law culture would increase the Islamic legitimacy of Egypt’s overall legal system; facilitate Egyptian courts’ reconciliation with the constitutional commitments to Islamic authenticity, modernization, and human rights; and assist in Egypt’s democratic transition.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.004 | 0.007 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.006 | 0.025 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.011 | 0.006 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.004 | 0.004 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.005 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".