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When should a court go beyond the case in front of it? When should it refuse? These are the questions of judicial activism, and in Bangladesh they are not academic. The Supreme Court has struck down constitutional amendments, declared rivers legal persons, written guidelines that operate as law, and, in the view of critics, occasionally overreached. Ridwanul Hoque’s book, published in 2011, was the first serious attempt to study this record as a whole and to propose a principle for judging it. It remains the standard work.

The Author and the Book

Hoque, then a professor of law at the University of Dhaka, holds degrees from Chittagong and Cambridge and a doctorate from SOAS in London, where this book began as a thesis. The academic origin shows in the book’s thoroughness. It runs to eight chapters and draws on an unusually wide range of Bangladeshi case law, much of it unreported or hard to find, as well as comparative material.

The first two chapters set out the problem and its jurisprudential foundations, examining separation of powers and the legitimacy of judicial lawmaking. The third is a comparative survey of activism in the United States, the United Kingdom, South Africa, India and Pakistan. The fourth and fifth are the heart of the book: a detailed account of activism in the Bangladesh Supreme Court and of the public interest litigation that has been its main vehicle since the FAP-20 case. The sixth chapter examines the higher judiciary during the state of emergency of 2007 and 2008, a revealing test of judicial courage. The seventh identifies the barriers to and promoters of balanced activism, and the eighth proposes a framework the author calls enlightened judicial activism.

The Argument

Hoque’s central idea is the golden mean of his subtitle. Judicial activism, he argues, is neither good nor bad in itself. What matters is whether it is necessary, socially relevant and institutionally balanced. A court that refuses to act when fundamental rights are being violated and the other branches are silent fails its constitutional duty. A court that substitutes its own policy preferences for those of elected bodies, or that issues directions it cannot enforce, damages its own legitimacy and invites backlash. Between these lies a form of activism that responds to real need, respects the roles of Parliament and the executive, and is disciplined by reasoned justification.

He is particularly good on the distinction between activism and what he calls judicial excessiveness. The Supreme Court’s public interest jurisprudence, he shows, has at times issued sweeping directions that were never implemented, which teaches litigants and officials alike that judgments can be ignored. Restraint, on this view, is sometimes the more effective form of activism.

Reading It in 2026

The book predates the most dramatic episodes of the last fifteen years: the Thirteenth Amendment case in its full form, the Sixteenth Amendment case, the Turag judgment, the reviews of 2024 and 2025 that reversed or confirmed earlier landmark decisions, and the constitutional upheaval since 2024. None of these is discussed. Yet the framework applies to all of them with uncomfortable precision. Was the 2011 caretaker judgment necessary, or did it substitute judicial for political judgment on electoral design? Was the 2025 review a correction or a second act of activism? Hoque’s categories give readers a vocabulary for these debates that has not been bettered.

Some limitations should be noted. The prose is academic and occasionally dense; this is a book to study rather than to read on a train. The comparative chapter, though useful, is broad rather than deep. And the concept of enlightened activism, like all golden means, is easier to state than to apply: reasonable people will disagree about which side of the line a given judgment falls on.

Verdict

For students writing dissertations on public interest litigation, constitutional review or the separation of powers in Bangladesh, this is the essential starting point. Its case law references alone justify the price. For practitioners and judges, it offers a mirror: a careful, sympathetic but critical account of what the Supreme Court has done with its power, and a standard against which to measure what it does next. A second edition covering the last fifteen years would be a major contribution. Until it appears, the first remains required reading.

Sources

1. BD Law Digest, review of Judicial Activism in Bangladesh: A Golden Mean Approach: https://bdlawdigest.org/judicial-activism-bangladesh-golden-mean-approach.html
2. South Asia Research, book review (2012): https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/0262728012454704
3. Wikipedia, Ridwanul Hoque (author biography): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ridwanul_Hoque