Pakistan has a supreme court. Then it built a supremacist one.

Earlier this month, Justice Yahya Afridi, the last person who will hold the title of Chief Justice of Pakistan, handed down a judgment declaring that the Supreme Court and the Federal Constitutional Court (FCC) are coordinate apex courts, neither subordinate to the other. The judgment did not arrive in a vacuum. It answers a sequence of recent rulings from the new Federal Constitutional Court asserting, with mounting confidence, that it now sits at the top of the judicial pyramid. To follow the...