Over the last two decades, courts and the judiciary have become major players in the political landscape in Asia. Such a trend toward the judicialization of politics is well documented for Europe, Latin America, and the United States, yet the causes, variations, and consequences of its emergence in Asia have been largely unexplored. To the best of my knowledge, there has been no systematic exploration of shifts in power to the judiciary throughout Asia, and certainly no studies linking these developments to the general theoretical debate on the judicialization of politics. The lack of theoretical and empirical attention to Asia should perhaps not come as a surprise. With legacies of authoritarian executive dominance, an exceptional degree of regime diversity, and institutional arrangements, values, and leadership practices that differ, at times substantially, from those of the West, Asia is a particularly challenging environment for the study of judicial politics. Yet as one of the most dynamic and complex regions in the world, it also offers a fascinating opportunity to explore new judicial dynamics within a rapidly changing environment and across a vast spectrum of contexts; test how effectively theories that evolved elsewhere travel; and thus draw new comparative insights for the academic debate. It is in this spirit that, rather than prescribing a particular approach, this volume seeks to capture the remarkable complexity of what is happening by presenting a diversity of cases from a variety of regime types in East, Southeast, and South Asia. Although we have assigned the cases to categories of ‘established democracies’, ‘fragile and young democracies’, and ‘authoritarian and semi-authoritarian regimes’, the categories are at best permeable. Indeed given how fast politics in Asia changes, the authors were encouraged to freely expand upon the theme as they trace the changing nature of judicial engagement within a country and explore the causes and the consequences.