Judicial autonomy from societal actors is argued herein to be a critical aspect of the rule of law and to have been overlooked by the dominance within comparative judicial politics of the role of interbranch judicial independence. These distinct concepts are parsed and then interrelated to form a typology of four "judicial regime types": liberal regimes, partisan control regimes, clandestine control regimes, and government control regimes. These regime types are then traced in five Central American countries.