This sociological study is focused on the primary characteristics of judges as a professional group: socio-demographic traits, professional community structure, values and norms, characteristics of professional behavior, workload and budgets of time.
This study is based on analysis of a representative sample of 10 000 commercial cases from over 5 million cases, which the courts considered from 2007 to 2011. The cases were chosen from the websites of arbitrage courts and coded into the database as 66 variables. They represent the typical structure of cases considered by Commercial courts . This paper describes empirical patterns that appear in the process of the court’s everyday work. We pay particular attention to the behavior of the litigants, the court, and the character of the cases.
According to the plan, several amendments to the Civil Code of the Russian Federation will be considered during the autumn 2012 session of State Duma. These amendments, along with several provisions of the “Olympic” law, in force on the territory of Krasnodarski krai, presuppose simplification of the procedure of property confiscation, but on the whole territory of Russia. Simplification of the procedure may bear particularly painful consequences for informal owners. Informal owners are those whose property rights are acknowledged in practice but are not secured legally. According to various estimates, 25 to 50 million citizens who own immovable property, face such a situation.
Independence of the judicial system is one of the key provisions necessary for the effectiveness of the national law enforcement environment, its competitiveness compared to jurisdiction of other states, and stimulation of economic growth. Only a truly independent court (independent not only from the litigants but also from other branches of government) may help in overcoming legal nihilism. It will also make it possible to transfer a large portion of human interaction into the legal framework and avoid aggravation of conflicts in Russia.
A Russian federal law passed in late 2008 requires that courts openly disclose a significant portion of their judgments online. This event has special significance since not a single country with a long-standing tradition of justice could(has taken?) take such a decisive step. Even the case law mechanism does not entail such wide and unhampered access to judicial decisions. For twenty years Russia hesitantly trod towards the path of judicial reform. Even so, they did not manage to acquire the conservatism that would hamper the transition to open disclosure of judicial acts. By the time the discussion of the bill began, there had been no justifiable objections, and the advantages were obvious to everyone. The primary advantage of to the open disclosure of judicial acts is the possibility to make use of public opinion and all its potential. Secondly, there is the possibility of increased efficiency of the procedure of working out judicial practice. The law came into force on July 1, 2010. Two years since its passing it is now possible to review some of its consequences.
Starting from 2002, Russian criminal records reflect data on a simplified form of court hearings (regulated by art. 40 of the Code of Criminal Procedure “Special order of making a court decision when the defendant admits the charges”), or in short – the ‘special procedure’, namely, a Russian version of plea bargain. The special procedure entails a bargain of guilt confession: the defendant admits the charges, after which the court hearing winds down to establishing a type and size of sentence, with no investigation of proof. In return, the scale of the defendant’s maximum sentence is reduced one-third (part 7, art. 316 of the CCP).
Russia presents a vast fertile ground for empirical studies in the sociology of law. The condition whereby laws and courts, law enforcement organizations do exist, while the rule of law does not obtain, or when practical, informal laws prevail over formal laws, or, equally, laws are used instrumentally by powerful interest groups requires sociological approach. Legal research can tell us important things about the legal doctrine, reveal inconsistencies in statutes, and identify loopholes that enable the abuse of law. But legal research can give us little knowledge of what happens when law meets real life, when it actually affects or fails to affect human behaviour or produces effects unintended by legislators. The Russian legal realm is much more law in action than law on paper – a condition that invites sociological inquiry of social practice rather than normative analysis of legal texts. The sociological turn in legal studies in Russia is long overdue, and international scholarship can both help to make this turn and benefit from it.
The level of activity of law enforcement authorities in terms of the detection of economic crime has changed several times during the last 12 years. The phase of sharp activity decline lasted from 2000 to 2003, that of stable growth from 2004 to 2008, and again decline in 2009-2011.
July 1, 2011 will mark the one-year anniversary of the passing of the Federal Law “On provision of access to information about activities of courts in the Russian Federation.” The most important provision of this Law is the requirement that court rulings be placed online. The Institute for the Rule of Law has monitored implementation of this legal norm.
The low quality of the institutional environment in Russia negatively affects the speed of economic growth, decreases the well-being of the citizens and prevents technological development. Currently, as our study shows, the institutional environment is not as bad as it is generally believed to be – at least in regards to certain aspects. On the contrary, the bad institutions that stall economic activity are localized in specific clusters of the institutional environment. We may call them inhibition-points that have appeared within the Russian economy (as a counterpart of growing-points). The inhibition-points stall certain types of economic activity, and, although indirectly, negatively affect the economic situation in general, especially concerning the growth perspectives.
