Laws journal published an article by Aryna Dzmitryieva, which examines the process of selecting cases at the Constitutional Court of the Russian Federation and the role of the Secretariat in the selection process. Every year the Court receives more than fifteen thousand appeals, but only a few dozen cases are decided. The article describes the process of processing cases at different stages - from the moment an appeal is received by the Secretariat to the moment the decision on the case is pronounced. Full text.
The Institute for the Rule of Law presents a journal version of our “A New Quantitative Criminology Manifesto: Evidence-Based Criminal Justice Policymaking”. This paper stresses the importance of new technologies and approaches to data analysis in criminology research geared toward evidence-based policymaking. This manifesto demonstrates how quantitative methods can be used to get new insights into the nature of crime and the formulation of Russian criminal justice policy.
The Journal Sravnitel'noe konstitutsionnoe obozrenie published an article by Aryna Dzmitryieva "The art of legal writing: A quantitative analysis of russian constitutional court rulings". The article applies the methods of quantitative studies of legal texts to the decisions of the Constitutional Court of the Russian Federation. The analysis uses the formal quantitative index of the plainness of texts, namely the Flesh-Kincaid index, in order to understand to what degree the readability of the Court rulings correlates with various applicant categories and how the Court considers various cases and reacts to various challenges. The author surveyed 473 decisions issued be- tween 1992 and 2015; a thorough analysis of this material constitutes the core of this study. The author finds that the overall complexity of the text of the Constitutional Court’s decisions is high and demands a high degree of competence from the reader. The paper also shows that the complexity of the decisions has been steadily increasing since the first decision of the Court was issued in 1992. It also finds that, all else being equal, the com- plexity of the language of decisions highly correlates with the type of ap- plicants and types of issues that appeared before the Court. When com- pared to ordinary civil complaints, the Court uses more complex language when addressing cases initiated by business or by governmental bodies. This paper finds a similar though weaker trend when comparing issues on social and labour law with other topics. The author concludes that the in- creasing linguistic complexity of the decisions of the Constitutional Court may negatively influence the enforceability and implementation of these decisions, as well as increase the risk that such complex legal writing will spread throughout legal community. Full text (in Russian)
The article of Vadim Volkov «Legal and Extralegal Origins of Sentencing Disparities: Evidence fromRussia’s Criminal Courts» has been published in «Journal of Empirical Legal Studies» (Volume 13, Issue 4, 637-665, December 2016).
Fourth issue, 2016 of the Transnational Dispute Management includes a paper by Dmitriy Skougarevskiy, researcher at the Institute for the Rule of Law (and by his co-author Wolfgang Alschner). This paper is titled «Rule-takers or Rule-makers? A New Look at African Bilateral Investment Treaty Practice».
The article of Aryna Dzmitryieva and Vadim Volkov «Recruitment patterns, gender, and professional subcultures of the judiciary in Russia» has been published in the International Journal of the Legal Profession. The article explores sources of recruitment of judges and the influence of the social characteristics of judges on professional culture. Using the original survey and interview data from the Russian Federation, the authors identify and explain the changes in recruitment patterns that followed the judicial reform in the early 2000s. The authors look for profession-related differences between judges who had prior experience of work in the prosecutor’s office and judges who were recruited from the court’s non-judicial technical staff or from police investigation. Access the full text of this article here.
September, 2016 issue of the Journal of International Economic Law includes a contribution by Dmitriy Skougarevskiy, researcher at the Institute for the Rule of Law. This paper, co-authored with Wolfgang Alschner and titled «Mapping the Universe of International Investment Agreements», explores the diverse landscape of bilateral investment agreements and free trade agreements with investment provisions.
The Journal of World Investment & Trade (Volume 17, Issue 3, pages 339 – 373) includes a co-authored contribution (with Wolfgang Alschner) titled «The New Gold Standard? Empirically Situating the Trans-Pacific Partnership in the Investment Treaty Universe».
