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Chief Justice Cornelius of Pakistan: An Analysis with Letters and Speeches RALPH BRAIBANTI, 1999 Karachi: Oxford University Press 389 pp., ISBN 0-19-579018-9
Ralph Braibanti has produced a book that is both a learned and insightful examination of Pakistan's legal and administrative environment as well as a collection of either rare or little remembered letters and speeches of the late chief justice of Pakistan's Supreme Court, A. R. Cornelius. In a fascinating approach to Pakistan's search for the rule of law, and in spite of his disclaimer that his book does not go beyond the Cornelius Era (1950-1970), Braibanti nevertheless addresses the first 50 years of Pakistan's legal and juridical history. The fact that he does this through the life and work of a man he admires and respects as a foundation pillar of the Pakistani state is simply to restate the old saying, `the more things change, the more they remain the same'.
Present as an advisor to the Civil Service Academy in Lahore in the early years of the Pakistan experience, Braibanti spans the transition from British mentoring to self-reliance and indigenous government. Moreover, these pages reveal that his fascination with the Pakistan experiment never escaped the author. At the end of the twentieth century as with his initial exposure to Pakistan, Braibanti remains impressed with the extraordinary efforts made by Pakistan's men and women who became the guardians of the legal tradition. More than that, Braibanti is the first to admit that the riddle of Pakistan still calls for a solution. The author cites the complexity of the Pakistan experience, and holds to an argument he presented decades ago, that Pakistan is the most enigmatic of countries, in major part, because it continues to attempt to `graft an Islamic polity to a structure which has been deeply influenced by British law' (p. xxiii).
This book is cast as an historical document whose central theme is the preservation of the Cornelius contribution to Pakistan's political development. The inclusion in this publication of Braibanti's own foundation studies on the role of Pakistani law in the building of a new nation, however, points to a conclusion with broader interpretation. Like Cornelius, Braibanti seeks to turn the attention of the contemporary generation of Pakistanis to those aspects...