Judicial training in Saudi Arabia: From an unmodified to codified system

Abstract

The precise description of the roles and qualifications of Saudi judges (qāḍī) in the legal process assist in understanding the actual practice of jurisprudence. This paper aims to shed light on the jurisprudential procedure and the responsibilities of judges in the past and present Saudi legal system. Although the Saudi judges had freedom to exercise independent reasoning in the process of evaluating cases during the uncodified period before the 2020s, they were required to follow the classical regulations that were transmitted by the previous Ḥanbalī scholars’ textual sources. On the other hand, recent codification attempts provide Saudi scholars with a kind of set of systematized traditional rules and bring standardization in final decisions. Since the rules of codification are directly derived from the main sources (the Qur’an and Sunna) of Islamic law, the Saudi legal system is supposedly governed by the traditional framework of Islamic law, and this semi-independent nature separates it from its counterparts’ dependent codified legal systems. This article elucidates the transformational process of the Saudi legal system from classical implementation to codification. In applying analytical and descriptive methods, the objective of this paper is to investigate the responsibilities and training process of the judges and the jurisprudential procedure in the Saudi legal system.