Judicial Power in Russia: Through the Prism of Administrative Justice

This article assesses the power of judges in Russia (on courts of general jurisdiction, arbitrazh courts, and military courts) in dealing with cases in which the government or one of its officials is a party. Power, that is, the resources of judges to make binding decisions, is understood as including jurisdiction, discretion, and authority to ensure compliance. The article analyzes the dramatic growth of jurisdiction and caseload in administrative justice in post-Soviet Russia to the year 2002 and examines how the courts have performed in handling the review of actions by officials (including in the military), tax cases, electoral disputes, and the legality of normative acts (both regulations and laws of lower governments), especially in the late 1990s. High rates of success for persons bringing suits against the government suggest that judges were able by and large to adjudicate fairly and rule against the state. To a considerable degree (but not always), those decisions were implemented (more often than were constitutional and commercial decisions). Interestingly, citizens who challenged the actions of officials in court had much more success than those who brought complaints to the Procuracy. Finally, the article develops an agenda for future research that would deepen understanding of the significance of administrative justice in the Russian Federation and the power of judges.     

Calling the Judiciary to Account for the Past: Transitional Justice and Judicial Accountability in Nigeria

Institutional and individual accountability is an important feature of societies in transition from conflict or authoritarian rule. The imperative of accountability has both normative and transformational underpinnings in the context of restoration of the rule of law and democracy. This article argues a case for extending the purview of truth-telling processes to the judiciary in postauthoritarian contexts. The driving force behind the inquiry is the proposition that the judiciary as the third arm of government at all times participates in governance. To contextualize the argument, I focus on judicial governance and accountability within the paradigm of Nigeria's transition to democracy after decades of authoritarian military rule.     

Efficient,Fair, and Incomprehensible: How the State “Sells” Its Judiciary

Socio‐legal scholars often approach dispute resolution from the perspective of the disputants, emphasizing how the resources on each side shape the course of conflict. We suggest a different, “supply‐side,” perspective. Focusing on the state's efforts to establish centralized courts in place of local justice systems, we consider the strategies that a supplier of dispute resolving services uses to attract disputes for resolution. We argue that state actors often attempt to “sell” centralized courts to potential litigants by insisting that the state's services are more efficient and fair than local courts operating outside direct state control. Moreover, we argue that state actors also invest significant energy in claiming that the local courts are incomprehensible. Thus, in its efforts to introduce and advance centralized courts, the state argues not only that it offers the best version of what the citizenry wants, but also that it is impossible to conceive that people would want something other than what the state offers. We illustrate our argument and explain its significance by examining judicial reform in New York, where there has been a decades‐long effort to displace local justice systems.     

Abolition of plea bargaining in the coast guard

In the administration of criminal justice, the abolition or restriction of plea bargaining has raised many issues. Of primary concern is the impact on court systems and case dispositions. This research note looks at the Coast Guard military justice system and its 1975 decision to abolish pretrial agreements, effectively eliminating plea bargaining in that system. Studying criminal cases from 1973 to 1978, we determine if that intervention in a time series exhibits any potency. Specifically, what difference did the abolition of plea bargaining make? We find that the abolition of plea bargaining did not make much of a difference to the Coast Guard military justice system, similar to the conclusions drawn from studies of civilian courts.     

韩国国家安全与表达自由案例研究

国家安全与表达自由之间的冲突是每一个国家在任何一个历史阶段均必须直面的重大问题。韩国专制主义盛行的20世纪60年代至90年代中期所涉及的“国家安全与表达自由”典型司法案例反映了韩国普通法院及宪法法院在衡平这两者价值间冲突的立场变迁及韩国法院在维护人权和促进韩国民主与法制发展中所扮演的角色,可为中国学界在“国家安全与表达自由”这样复杂而又棘手的问题上,提供些许可借鉴的外域经验。     

International Arbitration and Judicial Politics in Authoritarian States

This article uses the case of Sudan to show how authoritarian regimes benefit from embracing international arbitration, allowing them to maintain domestic control and attract foreign investment. International arbitration ensures that foreign‐investment disputes are resolved outside of domestic purview, obviating the need for nondemocratic states to create independent courts. Research on judicial politics in authoritarian regimes has largely overlooked those private and extra‐judicial pathways—international arbitration tribunals—that illiberal regimes have been taking. Similarly, research in international commercial law has neglected domestic politics, overlooking arbitration's consequences for domestic stakeholders. Promoting international arbitration without paying heed to its side effects can unwittingly help illiberal regimes, particularly in weak states, to continue to repress their judiciaries and curtail the development of domestic legal institutions and the rule of law.     

Complex Harmony: The Military and Professional Models of Policing

This article discusses the importance of the military model throughout police reform, and how it has coexisted with, rather than been supplanted by, the professional model. Early reformers chose the military upon which to structure their concept of the urban police. That concept was refashioned into the professional model as the background of the reformers changed. This new model then replaced the military model in criminal justice literature, public vernacular, and police self-image, although the military model continued to exist under the radar. Today the “militarization of the police” is a major criminal justice topic, but its recent visibility is actually an ongoing part of the original reform ideal.

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Patronage and Rationalization: Reform to Criminal Procedure and the Lower Courts in Chile

This article analyzes how the lower criminal courts in Chile transitioned from an inquisitorial to an adversarial justice system between 2000 and 2005 as part of the Criminal Procedure Reform. Drawing on the frame analysis of the street‐level bureaucracy and judicial ethnography, I examine the transition between two different types of judicial bureaucracy from the perspective of the actors who implemented the reform. The study is based on in‐depth interviews with officials and judges of both inquisitorial and adversarial courts, administrative managers of the new courts, and actors who designed the administrative reorganization of lower criminal courts. The study involved a three‐month, weekly observation in an inquisitorial court in Santiago de Chile. The article emphasizes the specificity of the Chilean judiciary, where both inquisitorial and adversarial criminal courts still coexist.     

Military Justice: Case Processing and Sentencing Decisions in America’s “Other” Criminal Courts

A wealth of criminological research examines punishment outcomes in state and federal courts, but virtually no research examines the thousands of defendants punished in the military justice system each year. Military courts are characterized by unique case processing norms and distinctive socio-cultural influences that shape punitive decision-making in key ways. The current study provides a broad, systematic analysis of the correlates of criminal case processing in this rarely examined court context. It analyzes a large sample of Air Force court-martial cases, evaluating the evidence for gender and racial/ethnic disparities and the influence of military-specific considerations. Findings indicate that some factors, like offense seriousness, exert influences that are largely consistent with the civilian court literature, but others including gender, race/ethnicity and case processing decisions operate in ways that are particular to military courts. Results are interpreted in light of contemporary sentencing theoretical perspectives.     

Paradigm Muddle: The Threat to Restorative Justice Posed by Its Merger with Community Justice

The restorative justice movement has great potential to reform the way society responds to crime and wrongdoing. One might logically assume that the greatest challenge to the new restorative justice paradigm is the traditional punitive criminal justice paradigm itself. A more immediate threat, however, is posed by merging community justice, another approach to reforming the justice system, with restorative justice. Community justice has superficial similarities to restorative justice but relies on the underlying authoritarian assumptions of the existing criminal justice system and on processes that exclude most of those individuals directly affected by the offense. This paper clarifies and contrasts the key elements of both the restorative justice and the community justice paradigms and explains the threat to restorative justice posed by combining and confusing the two.     

Judicial Activism in Perilous Times: The Turkish Case

Under what circumstances do courts act in ways that challenge the political hegemony of the military in countries with weak democratic institutions? This article addresses this question by focusing on a critical case of judicial activism in Turkey. It argues that lower courts unexpectedly can be centers of judicial activism that contributes to expansion of civil liberties and restrictions on arbitrary state power when the high judiciary supports the political status quo. This is because lower courts provide greater access to legal mobilization pursued by civil society actors. At the same time, judicial activism in lower courts is sustainable only when political power is distributed among elites with conflicting interests, and the civilian government offers support and protection to activist members of the judiciary.     

Discretion and corruption: The Chilean judiciary

Corruption in the judiciary and its effects on the budget of that branch of government, the efficiency of justice (prompt or belated) and its quality (biased or impartial) are analyzed. The discretionary powers of the Supreme Court and those granted to judges to manage their courts, calendar and case load, and the hierarchical administrative structures of judiciaries, which function as a queueing system, may be used as a tool to maximize graft. These phenomena reveal links between institutional forms and incentives. Using the case of Chile and the exceptional emergence of corruption within the judiciary during the military dictatorship, the role of democracy as a punishing and preventive mechanism is highlighted.This article was written while the author was a Senior Fellow at the Orville Schell, Center for International Human Rights Law at Yale Law School, and under the auspices of the North-South Center of the University of Miami.     

Two paradigms of justice: criminal vs survivor justice in Africa

African countries continue to experience civil wars and other low-level violent conflicts. An issue relating to the intractable nature of postcolonial violence and how it should be resolved, is what is the potential for advancing contemporary peace processes and negotiated agreements through the notion of survivor justice? Two paradigms of justice have emerged in Africa in response to mass violence: criminal justice based on the example of the Nuremberg trials; and survivor justice based on political reform and exemplified by the cases of South Africa and Sudan. These two paradigms of justice are compared, with the context undergirding the debate and assumptions of each explored, and how this related to the issues of building peace in Africa. The guiding question is whether civil wars can be ended in courts. I argue that where a decisive military victory is untenable, survivor justice, that is political reform combined with judicial reconciliation, is the best way to resolve Africa’s conflicts. The example of South Africa’s political settlement and the reconciliation process in Rwanda offer examples of solutions for conflict transition to peace. Criminal justice processes – absent a decisive military victory – can act to delay and prevent peace and resolution.     

High‐End Demand: The Legal Profession as a Source of Judicial Selection Reform in Urban China

Most studies of comparative judicial politics suggest that judicial autonomy emerges from democratic competition, but despite its authoritarian political system, China has introduced reforms that increase merit‐based competition, transparency, and modest professional autonomy in local courts. Variations in judicial selection procedures across urban China reflect differences in local markets for professional legal services: when mid‐ranking judges can easily find lucrative local employment as lawyers, court leaders strategically reform appointment and promotion mechanisms to retain these young, but experienced, judges. These findings are based on nearly fifteen months of in‐country fieldwork, conducted between 2012 and 2014, including forty‐nine interviews with judges across three different cities: Shanghai, Shenzhen, and Chengdu. Employing the subnational comparative method, this article not only builds theory regarding the legal profession's role in authoritarian states, but also offers new empirical detail regarding the selection, performance evaluation, and behavior of judges in urban China.     

'Solange, chapter 3': Constitutional Courts in Central Europe—Democracy—European Union

Abstract: Soon after the accession of eight post‐communist states from Central and Eastern Europe to the EU, the constitutional courts of some of these countries questioned the principle of supremacy of EU law over national constitutional systems, on the basis of their being the guardians of national standards of protection of human rights and of democratic principles. In doing so, they entered into the well‐known pattern of behaviour favoured by a number of constitutional courts of the ‘older Europe’, which is called a ‘Solange story’ for the purposes of this article. But this resistance is ridden with paradoxes, the most important of which is a democracy paradox: while accession to the EU was supposed to be the most stable guarantee for human rights and democracy in post‐communist states, how can the supremacy of EU law be now resisted on these very grounds? It is argued that the sources of these constitutional courts’ adherence to the ‘Solange’ pattern are primarily domestic, and that it is a way of strengthening their position vis‐à‐vis other national political actors, especially at a time when the role and independence of those courts face serious domestic challenges.     

“When They Come for You”: Legal Mobilization in New Authoritarian Russia

As of 2012, the Russian State Duma passed a string of repressive laws on nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), surveillance, and high treason. Under this “new authoritarian” regime, a growing number of Russians are investigated by the security services or put on trial for high treason. NGOs face selective prosecution and surprise inspections. While we know how lawyers use legal mobilization in democratic regimes where they can expect courts to be fair, legal mobilization remains understudied in regimes moving toward authoritarianism, where authorities pass repressive laws but enforce them erratically. Drawing on interviews with Russian lawyers, this article examines how lawyers represent two victim groups of state coercion: Russians under investigation for treason and prosecuted human rights NGOs. By examining how lawyers make strategic choices while coping with unfair courts, the random enforcement of laws, and shrinking resources, this article argues that state coercion does not deter lawyers from legal mobilization at domestic courts and the European Court of Human Rights. Instead, repressive laws push lawyers to reinvent their everyday practices to counter repressive legislation and conviction bias in the criminal justice system.     

Falling Short of Constitutional Norms: Does “Normative (In)Congruence” Explain the Courts' Inability to Promote the Right to Water in South Africa?

In South Africa, municipal noncompliance with legislation promoting the constitutional right to sufficient water is both a failure of the rule of law and a betrayal of that right. Judicial intervention has prompted formalistic compliance with water law, but the underlying commitment to sufficient water remains unfulfilled. Does the inability of courts to achieve social justice despite enforcing social legislation confirm the thesis that commitments to the rule of law and to social justice are inconsistent, that upholding the rule of law may not advance social justice? This article offers an alternative to this “inconsistency thesis,” arguing that the rule of law can accommodate social justice if it demands normative congruence alongside congruence with formal rules. Empirical investigation reveals that structural challenges and the multifarious normative demands on officials create a condition of normative incongruence that impedes the pursuit of social justice, even as courts compel congruence with formal rules.     

Human Rights Trials in an Era of Democratic Stagnation: The Case of Turkey

Domestic human rights trials are often conceptualized within the context of transition toward democracy. Yet, a recent cascade of trials in Turkey defies this argument. Between 2008 and 2015, Turkish courts oversaw fifteen trials examining individual criminal accountability for human rights violations carried out by the Turkish military during the conflict with the PKK in the 1990s. The cascade of trials has emerged and remained ongoing while the Turkish regime has become steadily more authoritarian. This article explains the emergence of these trials by the redistribution of power among elite actors, which created a window of opportunity allowing for ongoing legal mobilization to result in prosecutions. Drawing on original data from interviews conducted in Turkey between 2014–2015, this study demonstrates the importance of power redistribution for human rights during periods of democratic stagnation, while emphasizing the ability of trials to contribute to the contestation of hegemonic narratives.