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.
In 2019 Russia started a new phase of regulatory reform – „regulation guillotine.“ Our report, „The intermediate results of regulatory reform in Russia during 2016-2019“ summarizes the intermediate results of reform based on data from 11 major federal agencies. Full text (in Russian)
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).
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 text is available by the link (in Russian).
Center for Strategic Research has published its report "Proposals for Improving the Judicial System" co-authored by Vadim Volkov, Kirill Titaev, Aryna Dzmitryieva, and Timur Bocharov. The report provides a diagnostic assessment of the work of the Russian judicial system based on a series of empirical studies. These studies have revealed a number of issues that need to be addressed. The report suggests such policy measures as improving the quality of personnel; removing organizational restrictions and giving judges greater independence and the judicial system greater autonomy; and reducing the workload and simplifying the judicial process.
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".
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 IRL published a report by Aryna Dzmitryieva and Denis Saveliev "The Sources of Judiciary in Russia and the Role of Court Apparatus". The paper analyzes the professional and social structure of judicial personnel and identifies the main mechanisms of appointment to judicial positions. Analysis of the opinions of qualification boards of judges and other data sources shows that in recent years the number of applicants for judicial posts has been decreasing, as well as their diversity. The paper shows that the function of decision-making on the selection of judicial personnel has actually shifted to the level of court chairpersons, and the CCs only occasionally show autonomy. The ideal judicial candidate is not an independent and authoritative expert in the relevant field of law, but an executive and hard-working member of the court apparatus. Full text (in Russian)
