Most studies in the USA show that judges grant severe penalties in trials especially in jury trails comparing the plea. In Russia, court statistics shows the similar trend has been performed as by regional courts since 2014 just in the context of the decline in both the jurisdiction of jury trials and the number of jury cases. However, since mid-2018, jury trials have expanded their jurisdiction on the district courts, causing large logistical and time costs. Jury in Russia grant the acquittals hundred times more frequently than professional judges alone and that stimulates defendants to jury trials. Simultaneously, the court statistics shows that district courts perform the jury penalty despite the jury leniency. Expert interviews with judges held in 2019-2021 discover that this sentencing policy has two main motives: first, to compensate with more severe punishment for the resources, time and risks that the defendant caused to judiciary and prosecution by his/her motion for a jury trial, and the second — use the policy of sentencing as a factor deterring other defendants from choosing a jury trial.
The research paper in Russia is published here
Recent issue of Applied Economics Letters includes a research article by Ruslan Kuchakov и Dmitriy Skougarevskiy on the effects of wage subsidied by Russian central government on employment and profit margins.
Recent issue of the European Journal of Risk Regulation includes a paper by Vladimir Kudryavtsev, Ruslan Kuchakov, and Daria Kuznetsova titled «Two monkey wrenches in the Russian regulatory reform». This paper assesses the 2016 regulatory reform in Russia.
Juniour researcher IRL Dmitrii Serebrennikov and Julia Kuzmina had an article published in Journal of Economic Sociology (Ekonomicheskaya sotsiologiya). The paper is review of Donald Rubin causal model in the current field experiment researches. Text is availiable by link (in Russian).
The article ‘Is There a “Compensation Culture” in Contemporary Russia? The Role of Liability Insurance, Non-Pecuniary Damages, and Legal Profession in Personal Injury Litigation’ by Timur Bocharov has been published in the journal Oñati Socio-Legal Series. The article explores current trends in personal injury litigation in Russia compared with the common law countries (the UK and US). The specificity of the Russian situation is explained by the influence of the Soviet culture of tort law. The most visible areas of the Soviet impact addressed in the article are liability insurance, non-pecuniary damages, and the legal profession.The research is based on the analysis of judicial decisions on personal injury cases, court statistics, and expert interviews with personal injury lawyers.
The journal Europe-Asia Studies published an article by Aryna Dzmitryieva, which examines the selection process for judges in the Russian Federation. Based on an analysis of the decisions of the qualification boards of judges, the article shows that, all other things being equal (level of education, demographic characteristics), unconditional priority in the selection is given to candidates with experience in the public sector. It also shows that the influence of court presidents on the JQBs’ decision-making in the selection process undermines judicial independence and accountability. Full text
In 2020, the Journal of Drug Issues has published the paper by Alex Knorre about discontinuities in heroin seized by Russian police. The paper is titled "Do Russian Police Fabricate Drug Offenses? Evidence From Seized Heroin’s Weight Distribution".
"The Law: Journal of Higher School of Economics" published the article "A Study in Complexity of Sentences Constituting Russian Federation Legal Acts" by Denis Saveliev, the IRL researcher.
This article describes and analyzes the specific features of medical workers’ professional identity within the framework of the Russian penal system. The authors have studies the position of doctors in the organizational structure through the prism of Eliot Freidson’s concept of professional autonomy and Erving Goffman’s notion of the total institution. The empirical material is based on twenty-two semi-structured interviews with prison doctors, correctional officers, former prisoners, and human rights advocates. Organizational factors are vital for understanding the position of doctors: within the Russian penal system, doctors are not subject to the Ministry of Health, but to the Ministry of Justice. What emerges from this research is that the professional identity of doctors is mixed with institutional identity which resulted in a shift of loyalty from the patient toward a total institution. Despite prison doctors are formally independent from the prison administration, the professional autonomy of medical workers is limited significantly. In particular, they are restricted in following the professional ethical standards. In prisons, security is given a clear priority over healthcare. Doctors can work only through a system of ‘mutual concessions’ with correctional officers and the prison administration. These and some other conditions transform the doctor-patient relationship, creating an additional distance between them.
The paper is available by the link (in Russian).
The Law: Journal of Higher School of Economics published a scientific article by Denis Saveliev, the IRL researcher "On Creating and Using Text of the Russian Federation Corpus of Legal Acts as an Open Dataset".
