The Bloomsbury publishing house has published a book «The Foundations of Russian Law». The book was aimed by its editor Marianna Muravieva, a professor at the University of Helsinki, as a kind of textbook or dictionary for a foreign audience, primarily students. Ekaterina Khodzhaeva and Kirill Titaev are the authors of the eighth chapter of the book dedicated to the legal profession and legal education in Russia.
The book by Timur Bocharov and Aryna Dzmitryieva "Legal Education in Russia and Abroad: Between University, Profession, State and Market" is now available online.
The book analyzes legal education in Russia. The research uses extensive empirical material (analysis of statistics, questionnaire survey, expert interviews and focus groups). Authors distinguish three segments of legal education and analyze the teaching and approaches to the training of lawyers in mass, elite, and departmental institutions of higher education. Full text (in Russian)
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
The book 'Lawyers in 21st-Century Societies' edited by Richard L Abel, Ole Hammerslev, Hilary Sommerlad and Ulrike Schultz has been published in Hart Publishing.
This comparative volume presents sociological studies of legal professions across the world. The volume includes the report ‘Russia: Challenges of the Market and Boundary Work’ prepared by Timur Bocharov and Ekaterina Moiseeva. The report provides an overview of the Russian legal profession focusing on the challenges it has faced with the transition of Russia to a market economy.
Specialized schools of judges are becoming increasingly popular through Europe. The report preparred by Timur Bocharov, Aryna Dzmitryieva and Dmitriy Skugarevskiy provides a comparative overview of three judicial schools in France, Portugal and Poland.
The training model of these schools involves preparing candidates who already have a basic legal education for judicial positions. The training is therefore based not on the acquisition of new knowledge of the law, but on the acquisition of the practical skills, ethics and specific thinking necessary in the judicial work. The experience of other countries in organizing national schools of judges seems particularly relevant and useful in the Russian context, where the low quality of judges and the lack of independence of judges remain important - if not decisive - problems of the judicial system. Full text (in Russian).
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 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 book 'Being a Lawyer in Russia: Sociological Study of the Legal Profession' by Timur Bocharov and Ekaterina Moiseeva has been published in European University Press. The book presents the sociological study of the advocates’ profession in Russia. The main feature of Russia’s legal profession is its high level of fragmentation. It consists of several enclosed and loosely connected professional groups. Advocates are the most professionalized group of the Russian legal community in the sense that they correspond to the classical definition of “profession” and its attributes. However, ordinary citizens often do not see any differences between advocates and unlicensed lawyers calling both of them “advocates” or simply “lawyers.” The elite push forward a professional project attempting to expand their monopoly over all legal representation and bring the “army” of unnamed competitors under the bar.
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.
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".
