Scholars generally regard courts in authoritarian states as the pawns of their regimes, upholding the interests of governing elites and frustrating the efforts of their opponents. Yet in Egypt, a country with one of the most durable authoritarian regimes in the world, courts enjoy a surprising degree of independence and they provide a vital arena of political contention. From the standpoint of mainstream comparative law and politics literature, the Egyptian case presents a surprising anomaly. This chapter sets out to explain why Egyptian leaders chose to empower judicial institutions in the late 1970s when only twenty-five years earlier the same regime had stripped the courts of their power.

I find that state leaders deployed judicial institutions in an attempt to ameliorate a series of economic and administrative pathologies that are endemic to many authoritarian states. First, the consolidation of unbridled power resulted in a severe case of capital flight, depriving the economy of a tremendous amount of Egyptian and foreign private investment. Additionally, the concentration of political power paradoxically exacerbated principal-agent problems and impaired the ability of the regime to police its own bureaucracy, resulting in administrative abuse and corruption. These substantive failures damaged the ability of the regime to fulfill its populist agenda, and they undermined the revolutionary legitimacy that the regime had enjoyed for its first fifteen years. Faced with these compounding crises, Sadat eventually turned to judicial institutions to ameliorate the dysfunctions that lay at the heart of his authoritarian state.