M Siddique Ali Pirzada
PAKISTAN’S governance crisis is habitually diagnosed as a failure of legislation. Every economic downturn, constitutional controversy, environmental catastrophe or institutional scandal elicits the same political reflex: enact another law, establish another authority, promulgate another ordinance or unveil another policy framework. Legislative productivity has become the default grammar of governance, as though state effectiveness were measurable by the size of its statute book. That assumption is profoundly misconceived. Pakistan’s foremost governance deficit is not legislative scarcity but legislative inflation.
The distinction is constitutional rather than semantic. Democracies are judged not by the abundance of legislation but by its coherence, intelligibility and enforceability. Lon Fuller argued that legality depends upon clarity, stability and congruence between law and official conduct, while Joseph Raz regarded legal certainty as indispensable to the rule of law. Pakistan has inverted those first principles, treating legislative quantity as a surrogate for institutional quality and lawmaking as a substitute for governance.
Comparative legal scholarship describes this pathology as hyperlexis: the point at which legislative proliferation frustrates the purposes of law itself. Peter Schuck warns that regulatory overload obscures rather than clarifies legal obligation. Statutes layered upon statutes without systematic consolidation or repeal breed duplication, contradiction and uncertainty. The result is a constitutional paradox: more legislation accompanied by less legal certainty.
Pakistan illustrates this malaise with unusual clarity. Colonial enactments coexist with modern statutes, executive ordinances and proliferating regulatory frameworks, creating overlapping jurisdictions, competing procedures and inconsistent standards. Courts increasingly determine which legal regime governs a dispute before resolving the dispute itself.
The consequences are unmistakable. Pakistan possesses extensive environmental, climate, anti-corruption, labour and cybercrime legislation, yet environmental degradation, corruption, labour exploitation and administrative incapacity persist. Every policy failure invites another statute and every institutional weakness another regulatory framework, although successive legislative waves leave the underlying crises substantially untouched. Roscoe Pound’s distinction between “law in books” and “law in action” finds few sharper illustrations. The statute book expands while implementation remains sporadic, fragmented and selective. Administrative incapacity, institutional overlap and political interference frustrate legislative ambition, yet governments continue to answer implementation failure with fresh enactments. Every unenforced statute weakens confidence not only in itself but in the authority of law.
Jeremy Waldron reminds us that legislation derives democratic legitimacy from deliberation rather than perpetual production, while Montesquieu warned that unnecessary laws diminish respect for necessary ones. Before introducing another Bill, Parliament should ask three questions: Does existing legislation already regulate the problem? If so, why has it failed? Would faithful implementation achieve more than another enactment?
Until those questions discipline legislative deliberation, Pakistan will continue to mistake lawmaking for governance and statutory accumulation for institutional reform. Tacitus captured the danger nearly two millennia ago: “The more corrupt the state, the more numerous the laws.” Constitutional progress is measured not by the number of laws a nation enacts but by the fidelity with which it gives effect to those it already possesses.
—The writer is a commentator on International and Comparative Law.
