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 book ‘A Sociology of Justice in Russia’ edited by Marina Kurkchiyan and Agnieszka Kubal has been published in Cambridge University Press.
The book includes the chapter ‘When Business Goes to Court: Arbitrazh Courts’ in Russia’ prepared by Timur Bocharov and Kirill Titaev. This chapter explores how the relatively unique and autonomous structure of Russian commercial courts – known as Arbitrazh courts – operates. It takes a close look at the types of dispute decided on by Arbitrazh courts, how they process their caseload and the experiences of the different users of this institution of justice in Russia.
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 report is devoted to the issues of social adaptation of convicts during and after serving prison sentences. The relevance of the topic is associated with a high level of post-release recidivism in Russia. The author analyzes of statistics, Russian legislation, semi-structured interviews with prison officers, human rights activists. As a result, authors have found that in penal institutions, there are several areas of rehabilitation of convicts, in particular, labor, education, psychological support, medical assistance, and some other. Besides, inmates receive assistance from their families and non-profit organizations. After analyzing the collected data, it was possible to identify the chief characteristics of these areas.
The text is available by the link (in Russian).
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 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)
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 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».
