Bakiner, O. (2016). Judges Discover Politics: Sources of Judges’ Off-Bench Mobilization in Turkey. Journal of Law and Courts, 4(1), 131-157. When do judges initiate public action outside the courtroom? What kinds of political activities do they engage in? What are the consequences of their interactions with social and political actors? This article investigates judges’ efforts to influence …
Mert Arslanalp, T. Deniz Erkmen, “Mobile Emergency Rule in Turkey: Legal Repression of Protests during Authoritarian Transformation.” Democratization, vol. 27, no. 6 (2020): 947–69. Summary: One of the challenges of autocratizing governments in regimes with nominally democratic institutions is how to repress fundamental democratic rights while claiming to uphold the rule of law. Post-9/11 socio-legal …
This chapter examines Turkey’s transformation from a hopeful democratic state to a key example of democratic backsliding under the Justice and Development Party (AKP).
David M. Driesen, The Specter of Dictatorship: Judicial Enabling of Presidential Power. Redwood City: Stanford University Press, 2021. Summary: In The Specter of Dictatorship, David Driesen analyzes the chief executive’s role in the democratic decline of Hungary, Poland, and Turkey and argues that an insufficiently constrained presidency is one of the most important systemic threats to …
Dilek Kurban, “Authoritarian Resistance and Judicial Complicity: Turkey and the European Court of Human Rights.” European Journal of International Law, Vol. 35, No. 2 (2024): 355–387 Summary: International courts face growing contestations to their authority. Scholars have conceptualized the forms and grounds of such resistance as well as the response of international courts. Yet, in focusing …
Berk Esen, “Judicial transformation in a competitive authoritarian regime: Evidence from the Turkish case.” Law and Policy, vol. 47, no.1 (2025): e12250. Summary: What accounts for the variation in the judiciary’s ability to serve as a democratic guardrail under populist rule? This article contends that populist governments use judicial activism against their political agenda to …
In Turkey, the lawyer defending jailed Istanbul Mayor Ekrem İmamoğlu has himself been imprisoned amid what he calls a politically motivated purge. Mehmet Pehlivan, who represents İmamoğlu (President Erdoğan’s main rival), was detained in June on charges of belonging to a “criminal organization,” a charge he insists is entirely fabricated. Pehlivan told Reuters from prison …
Ergun Özbudun, “Turkey’s Judiciary and the Drift Toward Competitive Authoritarianism.” The International Spectator, vol. 50, no. 2 (2015): 42–55. Summary: Turkey has always been considered an “illiberal democracy”, or in Freedom House’s terms, a “partly-free” country. In recent years, however, there has been a downward trend toward “competitive authoritarianism”. Such regimes are competitive in that opposition …
Despite increasing authoritarian control over the judiciary, Turkish activist lawyers such as the Çağdaş Hukukçular Derneği strategically engage with the legal system as a form of grassroots resistance that challenges and redefines state-imposed legal boundaries.