Assassins have murdered 37 Iraqi judges and targeted many more since Saddam Hussein's statue was dragged through the streets of Baghdad five years ago. Extraordinary security measures wall off jurists from the public, making it all but impossible for them to administer justice with the transparency and accessibility required in a democratic society.

While the situation is daunting, legal reformers can mine nearly 4,000 years of legal tradition in Iraq. And University of Utah legal scholars will play a key advisory role in restoring judicial independence in a nation sharply divided along sectarian lines.

"They're struggling because they haven't the educational system to bring them along," says Wayne McCormack, a professor with the U.'s S.J. Quinney College of Law. He and colleagues Chibli Mallat and Hiram Chodosh recently spent a week in Baghdad, meeting with Iraqi political leaders and judges.

"A major challenge is the self-management of the court system. This isn't an uncommon challenge when courts move from executive control to independent administration," McCormack continues. "It's easy to structure a system on paper, but to make them work on a dad-to-day basis, that's an extraordinary effort."

In 2005, Iraq adopted a new constitution calling for an independent judiciary. But it remains a mere framework --still with no judiciary minister. The Quinney school has scholars with the expertise in Islamic, constitutional and international law to advise the Iraqis as they flesh out their new constitutional framework, U.S. State Department officials say. This is a key reason the U. was assigned an advisory role under a one-year, $2.5 million grant administered by the Bureau of International Narcotics and Law Enforcement Affairs (INL).

"They speak Arabic. They understand these traditions. They exhibited a familiarity with the legislative and political landscape of Iraq. .... Their being in tune with Arab culture really stood out," said Alex Wong, INL's Baghdad-based, rule-of-law adviser about the Quinney scholars. Under another INL initiative, U. law professors train Afghan prosecutors.

"The goal is an impartial and strong judicial branch, one that can stand up to the executive branch when needed, and the legislative branch when needed," Wong says. The Iraqi judges he has met say they long for the time they can conduct business and share tea with visitors out in the open as could happen before the Baath Party corrupted Iraq's legal system into a secret pawn of state security. Ironically, legal roots run deep in Iraqi soil.

A Babylonian king in 18th century B.C. crafted the world's first set of written laws. Hammurabi's Code, surviving today on a 7-foot basalt tablet called a stele, codified 282 one-sentence edicts for resolving conflicts. Under Ottoman rule, Iraq evolved a rich Islamic-based legal tradition that was merged in the 20th century with a judge-driven hierarchal system common on the European continent. (U.S. and British legal systems, by contrast, are more lawyer-driven and have decentralized sources of authority.)

"Saddam didn't destroy these institutions. He let them atrophy and created his own courts when he wanted to issue his dictator justice," Wong says. Iraqi courts "had been isolated from evolving international standards for process, evidence and human rights. Now we're playing catch up."

A major goal for U. advisers is helping Iraqis build judicial capacity -- establishing courts, training personnel, protecting jurists, ensuring public access -- but in a way that is home-grown with broad buy-in across Iraqi society, according to Chodosh, dean of the U. law school. In the process, U. professors will create opportunities for their students and improve the United States' understanding of a difficult region.

"Iraq provides an extraordinarily challenging and exciting opportunity for innovative educational collaborations of our world-leading research team with the 20 students in our Global Justice think thank," Chodosh says.

Iraq may be a mess, but the situation is promising because there appears to be broad interest in the rule of law as an alternative to violence, according to Mallat, a Lebanese-born scholar who spent time in Iranian jails for organizing Iraq's first free elections in 1992.

"They need to recognize themselves in whatever emerges," he said in a recent radio interview.

bmaffly@sltrib.com