Not so long ago, our measly rankings in the underbelly of the World Justice Project’s Rule of Law Index were announced as yet another reminder of how unbelievably hard it was to follow through on the constitutional promise of providing justice to all. In an out-of-the-blue development, however, the Law and Justice Commission of Pakistan has now questioned the very standards upheld in the report and more interestingly pointed to a string of presumptuous shortcomings. Ranging from the extension of previous data collected from 1000 “regionally-limited” participants, there appears no shortage of engineering facts out of perceptions. How could such a critically small sample (sans any information about experiences in the legal hallways of the country) “reflect the opinion of 230 million population,” the Commission has sighed. The methodological concerns are too in-the-face to gloss over, especially considering the discrepancies in the sample-to-population ratio (only 1059 interviews were conducted for a much, much larger Indian population). This is not to say that all is well and good in Pakistan. The rampant horrors of corruption and the abysmally absent openness of government are an open secret. Scraping just one layer would lead to countless stories about people simply not willing to knock on the doors of the justice system for the redressal of their grievances. Even back in 1958, our Law Reform Commission had lamented, “Papers move only on golden or silver wheels,” and sadly nothing has changed ever since. However, why is it that developing countries like Cambodia decrying their lowly rankings on this reductionist index refuse to garner any significant attention while the leaders of the free world continue to enjoy the limelight despite their fair share of fires? Take the cases of Hong Kong (ranked 19th) and the US (ranked 27th) for instance. What about sparing two precious cents on the unfinished projects as far as racial demographics and dissenting voices are concerned? *