Writing from
the practice.

Crossing the Rubicon: An Essay on the Lifting of the Corporate Veil in Pakistan

A long-form treatment of a doctrine the author describes as seeped in doubt and divergence. The essay traces the lifting of the corporate veil from Salomon through Adams in the English authorities, and through the Pakistani cases where it has surfaced and receded, before proposing what he calls the “five point Rubicon”, a five-point test to reconcile it with the sanctity of separate corporate personality. Some 82 authorities are cited.

To Report or Not to Report

The opening article of the Your Rights series, on the First Information Report, the most important document in a criminal case and the one most often refused. It sets out who may lodge an FIR, the eleven questions a complainant and recording officer should be able to answer, the seven ways an FIR may be used in evidence, and the mandatory duty of registration under Section 154 of the Criminal Procedure Code.

To Say or Not to Say

Divorce under Islamic law and the law of Pakistan, written for a general readership: the arbitration that must be attempted first, the distinct routes of Khula, Faskh and Mubarat, the reforms introduced by the Dissolution of Muslim Marriages Act 1939 and the Muslim Family Laws Ordinance 1961, and the notification procedure whose breach once invalidated a divorce. Its practical counsel is to settle rights at the time of the marriage rather than at its end.

Foreign AI, Pakistani Courts: Building Smart Courts Without Surrendering Judicial Data

With 2,270,584 cases pending nationwide, artificial intelligence will find its way into judicial administration; the question is not whether the courts should use it but whose AI, hosted where, trained on what and answerable to which legal system. The piece argues that judicial data is the legal memory of the State, and sets out a staged model: classify judicial data, contract explicitly for residency, retention, audit logs and breach reporting, build a locally hosted judicial AI layer under the supervision of the superior courts, and keep every output reviewable by a judge.

Justice Beyond Borders: The Quiet Export of Pakistan's Legal Memory

A warning that Pakistan's judicial records carry real risk once they are uploaded to AI systems beyond national control: material that enters foreign platforms may become reachable by foreign authorities under laws such as the CLOUD Act, and absorbed into commercial models. The article draws on Article 14 and Article 4 of the Constitution and on Justice Syed Mansoor Ali Shah's caution in C.P.L.A. No. 1010-L/2022, and calls for domestic judicial data infrastructure, a statutory framework governing AI in the courts, and a dedicated authority to control access.

The Price of Thirst

On the arithmetic of Pakistan's water crisis: per-capita freshwater availability has fallen from roughly 5,000 cubic metres in the 1950s to about 1,000 today, storage capacity stands at some thirty days against the thousand recommended for comparable climates, and more than 80 per cent of the population already faces severe scarcity for at least one month a year. Drawing on Australia and Singapore, the article argues for drip irrigation, AI-driven monitoring and desalination over politically driven megaprojects.

Child Labour and the Role of Pakistan Bait-ul-Mal

A study of the National Centres for Rehabilitation of Child Labour, which operate under the Pakistan Bait-ul-Mal, examining the effect of political and economic instability on their performance and asking whether the Centres can meaningfully curtail child labour. Thirteen years of data (1995–2008) were regressed to test the effectiveness of the safety nets. The results show marked improvement and considerable success in curbing child labour, but the study finds room left for broader government surveys, tailor-made educational and awareness programmes, and greater transparency in how the policies are implemented.

Proceedings of the 18th International Conference on Statistical Sciences (ICSS-18), Lahore, Pakistan, Vol. 35, 2021.

The Cost of Paper

What a country pays to stay on paper: warehousing and real-estate costs, the roughly three per cent of company revenue that Gartner attributes to paper, printing and filing, the productivity lost to manual approval, and the confidentiality risks of physical records. Drawing on Estonia’s move to a fully digital government and the State Bank of Pakistan’s green banking guidelines, the article makes the economic case for a paperless public sector.