The Centre of Strategic Research (Moscow) has published the analytical report ‘Enforcement of Court Decisions and Organisation of Bailiff’s Work’ prepared by Timur Bocharov, Katerina Guba and Alexey Knorre.
The report discusses the problems with the enforcement of court judgments in civil cases in Russia. It identifies drawing on statistics and expert interviews key factors contributing to these problems. The report also provides policy recommendations on how to improve the work of the Federal Bailiff Service. The full text in Russian is available on the CSR website.
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)
Institute for the Rule of Law published a book by Vadim Volkov, Aryna Dzmitryieva, Mikhail Pozdniakov and Kirill Titaev "Russian Judges: A Sociological Study of the Profession". The book discusses the structure of the judicial system and judicial proceedings in Russia. In book focuses on the history and the present day of judiciary in Russia. It also discusses their career trajectories. Where and how do judges get their education and initial experience? What values underlie their professional culture? What is the daily routine of judges, what are the conditions under which they work? How is the judicial community structured, what are its formal structures and mechanisms for selecting judicial candidates and mechanisms for controlling judicial conduct. How do judges interact with the outside world: society, government agencies? The book uses qualitative and quantitative data collected in 2011-2016. Selected chapters available at "Syg.ma".