THE age of laws is, perhaps, over. As someone put it, ‘When you don’t know what to do, you can always pass a law; it doesn’t cost much and it’s very satisfying. Whether it actually works is another matter.’ This observation could not be more accurate. I say this as a woman and a lawyer who has always had faith in the legal system’s power to deliver justice. At its heart lies the premise that citizenship involves faith in the law to deliver outcomes that restore people — in this case, women — to the wholeness taken away from them when they became victims of injustice.
This is no longer the case. Everywhere one looks, legal systems are being hollowed out. In terms of legal theory, the political has taken precedence over the legal and the just. It is not the first time: post-World War II, when new countries, including Pakistan, were just carved out, we were at a similar juncture. At the heart of Hitler’s campaign was the idea of a super-powered executive and the so-called power of the exception. Consolidation of power was the central tenet, and in this sense, the law became secondary to the political.
This is happening again. There are huge implications for women in particular — in Pakistan and elsewhere. Women have relied on legal systems over the decades because in many parts of the world, they have been pushed out of politics. Historically, they have been allotted the private realm, which, owing to patriarchal interventions, has been designated as being beyond politics. The reality is to the contrary; what happens in that space is political and determined by those whose lives and gender are considered worthy.
There are several examples of the consequences and of the inability of existing legal systems to respond to the unrelenting crisis of abuse by males. For instance, headlines in the West proclaim possible links between American President Donald Trump and child sexual abuser Jeffrey Epstein, who ran prostitution rings which included underage girls, apparently for powerful men to rape. One Epstein victim died by suicide. Trump has denied any knowledge of Epstein’s sex trafficking rings but continues to dither on releasing Epstein-related files.
Legal systems are unable to respond to abuse by males.
In her book Living With Men: Reflections on the Pelicot Trial, French philosopher Manon Garcia writes about witnessing a trial in which more than 50 men were tried and convicted for assaulting Gisèle Pelicot while she was unconscious. Her husband would drug her and arrange for men to rape her. Manon Garcia writes effectively on the limitations of the legal system in addressing male violence. At one point, she wonders how women anywhere can ever trust men when it can be so easy for a man to find 50 males, within a short distance, eager to assault an unconscious woman and then go on with their lives. Even the process of getting justice — in a public trial — is re-victimisation as men turn up to watch the proceedings, arguably, more interested in the lurid details than in seeing justice being done.
The laws against rape, against such utter depravity, exist, and the legal system grinds away. But many men — from lawyers to judges — see an opportunity for theatrics, for more public sexism, for re-entrenching, reiterating, and republicising the worst stereotypes of women as creatures available for men’s manipulation, enjoyment and ownership. ‘We can still do this and get away with it’ appears to be the masculine code.
Public trials of this nature, though perhaps less publicised, happen all over the world, including in Pakistan. They reveal the limits of the law, which is unable to dismantle the crude voyeuristic realities. In a world where the political has all but vanquished the legal, women will have to wrangle for and wield political power to ensure even the most basic protections for themselves. The specificities of the law, its ability to grant the individual female petitioner anything at all, stand in question in systems where the consolidation of power in the hands of individuals is shaping the future.
It is a dismal thought, especially if one has believed in the supremacy of the law. But the age of laws, it seems, is over. If legal systems enshrine procedure and rely on a deliberative process to produce outcomes that are non-arbitrary and constrained by precedent, the political is uncertain, wild and even feral given its close relationship with coercion and violence. The world in which the political reigns supreme is a harsh one — more Hobbesian and guided by the evolutionary ethic of survival of the most powerful. This world will be even harsher for women, who will now have to fight in public realms for fundamental rights and to protect their lives.
The writer is an attorney teaching constitutional law and political philosophy.
Published in Dawn, November 15th, 2025
