This report summarizes the annual federal agencies’ regulatory activity. We analyzed 550k inspections to highlight trends in Russian regulation in 2021. Full text (in Russia)
In a new policy memo titled “Legal Norms on Forced Breach of Contract (Force Majeure): a study of enforcement by State Commercial Courts” IRL researchers study how Russian commercial courts tackle the COVID-19 pandemic. We found 4161 cases considering this issue of non-performance due to force majeure from the universe of all rulings in March 2020 — October 2021. We then focused our analysis on cases related to the impossibility of fulfilling obligations under loan and credit agreements in disputes with banks, as well as in disputes of organizations affected by the pandemic.
This memo suggestes summary of the study which examines the previously unexplored form of social support that inmates enjoy: money transfers. We study the distance decay of financial support of prisoners. Drawing on proprietary data from a Russian prison tech company, we explore the universe of money transfers to any penal facility in Russia in 2017–19. To estimate the distance effect we build a gravity model of remittance flows from 1,117 cities to 931 penal facilities. The features of Russian penal geography reflect on the volume, frequency, and direction of transfers received by inmates. The gravity model of remittances suggests a pronounced distance decay. Correctional facilities closest to the sender city (0...144 km away, 1st percentile of pairwise distance) receive almost 10 times more funds than the facilities located 9,789...13,625 km away from the senders (the 99th percentile).
Read more in the article preprint «Prisoner social ties, money transfers, and sender-recipient distance: Evidence from Russia (in English)
Text is availiable by the link (in Russian).
This paper examines the previously unexplored form of social support that inmates enjoy: money transfers. We study the distance decay of financial support of prisoners. Drawing on proprietary data from a Russian prison tech company, we explore the universe of money transfers to any penal facility in Russia in 2017–19. To estimate the distance effect we build a gravity model of remittance flows from 1,117 cities to 931 penal facilities. The features of Russian penal geography reflect on the volume, frequency, and direction of transfers received by inmates. The gravity model of remittances suggests a pronounced distance decay. Correctional facilities closest to the sender city (0...144 km away, 1st percentile of pairwise distance) receive almost 10 times more funds than the facilities located 9,789...13,625 km away from the senders (the 99th percentile). The distance decay is mitigated in cities where people are more exposed to the penal system. Uncovered distance decay of financial support is associated with stigmatization of prisoners’ families.
The preprint is avaliable by the link.
"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.
The IRL presents policy memo: a study of lexical and syntactic complexity metrics of 880 thousand texts of decisions of arbitration courts of the Russian Federation in cases involving large businesses (from 10 billion rubles in revenue in 2016).
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".
The group of IRL researchers has published the analytical report ‘Acquittal and Rehabilitation in the Republic of Kazakhstan’. This report has been prepared as a part of the joint European Union and Council of Europe programme ‘Support to the Kazakh Authorities in Improving the Quality and Efficiency of the Kazakh Justice System’. The report explores the functioning of the criminal justice system in Kazakhstan and discusses the role of the acquittal and rehabilitation in its improvement. The full text in Russian is available on our website.
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.
