In September 2025, leading scholars, judges, and policy makers from across the world gathered at Stanford Law School for the first “Rule of Law and Democracy: Innovations and Challenges” conference. Over two days, conference participants explored two topics: (1) judicial innovations that have demonstrably improved the competence and independence of a country’s judiciary and (2) the prosecution of former heads of state for abuse of power while in office. Both topics are near the center of challenges to democracy and the rule of law today.

Academic and policy debates around the rule of law are not new. The fundamental principles of the rule of law—judicial independence, governmental transparency, consistent decision-making—are well established and broadly accepted. Similarly, the harms caused by recent waves of democratic erosion and autocratization are now well documented. The harder questions concern what institutional success actually looks like in practice. After the third wave of democratization in the late 1980s and early 1990s, dozens of countries undertook ambitious judicial reform efforts with optimism about building effective legal institutions. Yet when we examine the outcomes, the results are sobering: a recent study of more than forty instances where presidents attempted to defy term limits—perhaps the clearest threat to constitutional democracy—found that courts ruled against the executive in only two cases. Similarly, the proliferation of prosecutions against former heads of state in countries like Peru, Korea, Ecuador, Brazil, and France raises difficult questions about whether such accountability measures ultimately safeguard or destabilize democratic institutions.

Rather than revisiting well-worn debates about constitutional rights and access to services, this conference examined a few harder empirical and institutional questions:

• What judicial reforms have actually succeeded in building competent and independent judiciaries? And how has that helped the rule of law?
• What positive examples exist of courts resisting executive overreach?
• Is it a good idea to prosecute former heads of state for abuse of power?
• Do such prosecutions ultimately safeguard or undermine democracy and the rule of law?
• How should immunity for heads of state be structured?

Conference participants dug into these and other questions, considered points of consensus and disagreement, and outlined areas in need of further research and scholarly inquiry.

Other topics included:

• The challenge in prosecuting former leaders and the political risks involved.
• The role of judicial capture and its effects on case outcomes, especially in abuse of loans.
• Resource allocation within the judiciary and its use as a tool for influence or punishment.
• Issues tied to the use of technology such as spyware against both criminal and political actors.
• The complexities in removing or confirming judges with questionable appointments.
• Parliamentary oversight aimed at preventing politically motivated prosecutions.