![]() ![]() Saudi kings devoted considerable attention in the first decade of the 21st century to remaking the judicial order. Why is codification of law seen as such a dramatic step in Saudi Arabia? And why does the king seem incapable of making it happen? Since that date, however, his order has been neither challenged nor implemented. In 20 Saudi King Abdullah capped a decade of legal and judicial reforms in his country by reorganizing the judiciary and ordering that Saudi Arabia follow the step that virtually all other states in the region did long ago by codifying its laws - committing to paper a comprehensive compendium of the operative laws in the kingdom. In Saudi Arabia, a body by the same name served often to resist executive pressure and not only to oversee judicial affairs but until quite recently served as a supreme appellate court.) (For instance, most Arab states have a body called a "Supreme Judicial Council" to oversee judicial affairs and administer the judicial sector - and often to subordinate the judiciary to the executive branch. When the country has structures similar to those of neighboring countries, it uses a different word - what "administrative courts" are called or even the word used for "law." And just as confusing is that on those occasions when the same word or term is used, the similarity in language masks deep differences in structure and meaning. Saudi Arabia is a difficult place to understand, and its legal system is especially unusual - not so much because it is opaque but much more because it is sui generis. Vogel, in "Saudi Arabia: Public, Civil, and Individual Shari`a in Law and Politics," termed them "not a shot but a barrage across the bow of his partners in rule, the conservative religious establishment" and "clearly seismic events within the world of Saudi shari`a politics." ![]() ![]() The king's steps were sufficiently dramatic - and the identity of the Saudi state so deeply enmeshed in claims to be fully Islamic, especially in its legal structure - that longtime Saudi legal scholar Frank E. In the most recent moves, besides ordering codification, the king consolidated all sorts of quasi-judicial bodies that littered the legal framework of the kingdom, wrenched adjudication functions away from the Supreme Judicial Council (handing them to a newly created Supreme Court), and relieved the country's highest-ranking judge, a pillar of the old order, from his office at the head of the system. Initial steps taken were new procedure laws with new decrees insisting (with uncertain effectiveness) that courts follow prescribed rules in their operation - and making the courts, always ambivalent about the role of lawyers, friendlier to the legal profession.
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