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Family Code Reform in Morocco and Algeria: What Progress for Democracy? The reform of the family code enacted in Morocco in 2004 and in Algeria in 2005, reforms aiming to modernize the family institution, which as a result becomes more egalitarian for women and strengthens children's rights, is the outcome of a long and complex political process. The mobility of the positions and alliances of the actors in this process is a sign of the magnitude of the political reconfiguration underway: appropriation of the religious theme by all of the actors and semantic quarrels over the grammar of reform; resulting paralysis of national representative political bodies and mechanisms of appeal that refer to the scenario of authoritarian modernization, top-down reform, as well as modalities that challenge the viability of appeal procedures. Symptomatic of the judicialization of the political processes, the largely open debate on the application of the reform accompanying social transformations or, on the contrary, obliging society to conform to models imposed from the outside has made the figure of the judge emerge as the central actor in the reform.