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........

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