The article is dedicated to issues of the genesis and continuity of judicial power in the Republic of Latvia. On 18 November 1918, the State of Latvia was proclaimed as a democratic republic. ...Pursuant to the theory of separation of state power, the judicial power became one of the powers of the independent Latvian State. The author of this publication proposes the thesis that in examining the problems of the continuity of a democratic and judicial state the aspect of the continuity of the judicial power should not be ignored. Without analysing the aspect of the continuity of the judicial power, the assessment of the implementation of the state continuity would be incomplete.
This article looks at the ever-complex relationship between law and Japanese society. First, it outlines the path to reform proposed in 2001 by the Judicial System Reform Council. It then examines ...what has been hailed as the most fundamental reform of all, the introduction in 2009 of the saiban.in system – the Japanese People’s Jury. While this reform represents a marked break within the traditional field of criminal justice in Japan, it remains to be seen if it will produce a change in legal consciousness and if this will then lead to changes in other legal fields beyond criminal law. At first glance, the data covering the first ten years of these lay judge tribunals show encouraging signs. However, a closer examination of the reforms in practice reveals that significant change is difficult to achieve.
This article investigates the implementation effects of China's recent reforms to centralize its court system and offers an explanation of why such centralization efforts largely failed. Drawing upon ...in-depth interviews with judicial personnel from four localities, the study shows that local courts’ structural dependence upon same-level party-states is perpetuated or, in some cases, is even exacerbated, despite the unprecedented reform plans to centralize the budgetary and personnel management of the judicial system. Further investigation finds that, contrary to what existing assessments suggest, implementation failure is less a result of regional disparities in resources than of the party-state's own reliance on its horizontal line of power concentration and hierarchy, which is a core feature of the Chinese Communist Party's (CCP) one-party rule and hinders the party-state's own attempts to strengthen both judicial autonomy and centralization. The article thus challenges two extant notions on recent political-legal developments in China – that the CCP regime has substantially centralized its judiciary along the vertical line, and that judicial autonomy can continue to increase and manifest both under the conditions of, and serving the purpose of, deepening one-party authoritarianism.
•I test the hypothesis that judicial reforms supported by foreign aid constrain executive power.•I find that judicial reforms disproportionately benefit the powerless and discriminated groups of ...society.•TTheir perception that the president will never ignore the courts and laws is lower than other groups.•Judicial reforms close that gap in perceptions.
An accessible, swift and unbiased legal system may constrain the executive by limiting expropriation and the misuse of public office for private gain. I test this hypothesis by assembling a database of judicial reforms supported by foreign aid. To address the endogenous placement of these reforms, I implement a within-country identification strategy comparing groups more or less connected to the executive. I find that judicial reforms disproportionately benefit the powerless and discriminated groups of society. Their perception that the president will never ignore the courts and laws is lower at baseline by 11 percentage points compared to other more connected groups in society, and it differentially increases by 10 percentage points after a judicial reform, nearly closing the gap between groups.
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GEOZS, IJS, IMTLJ, KILJ, KISLJ, NLZOH, NUK, OILJ, PNG, SAZU, SBCE, SBJE, UILJ, UL, UM, UPCLJ, UPUK, ZAGLJ, ZRSKP
Politics has shaped the operation of the Chinese courts as well as their decision-making processes. This article surveys mostly empirical studies on the relationship between the courts and politics. ...It covers topics such as judicial independence, local protectionism, judicial mediation, judicial innovation, judicial reforms, and people's attitudes toward the courts. It provides a clue to understand the trajectory of the Chinese courts, the legal system, and the relationship between law and society in general.
El presente artículo indaga sobre los fundamentos y las características del discurso de desarrollo acuñado por el Banco Interamericano de Desarrollo a finales de la década de los sesenta del siglo ...pasado en América Latina. La perspectiva histórica que abordó, permitió comprender cómo desde la celebración del encuentro de gobernadores en Bogotá en 1969, el Banco adelantó una acción estratégica en la región basada en reformas institucionales y vinculadas con las agendas gubernamentales alineadas con las políticas de seguridad provenientes de Washington durante la guerra fría
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The criminal process in the Province of Buenos Aires has been affected by radical reforms in the last decades. Beginning with the complete replacement of the criminal procedure code in 1998 to the ...introduction of pre-trial hearings and simplified procedures for cases declared in flagrante delicto in 2004 the reforms have impacted more than legal procedures; they have changed the way judicial actors perceive themselves and their relations with the institution. Based on interviews with ten public defenders of the PBA this article offers an exploratory analysis on how public defenders’ perceptions have been impacted by those reforms and to what extent those internal changes have affected the internal dynamics of the PD. Drawing from the sociology of Bernard Lahire and Laurent Thenevot we identify in the public defenders’ responses how these changes affected their personal commitments. Mapping those commitments allow us to describe the
subjective folds
of the PD through which it is possible to better understand the decisions of public defenders by considering the internalization they make of the judicial world and its relationship with the institutional context.
This paper explores the contentions surrounding the legal reasoning in the judicial review of Ghana’s 2012 presidential election petition and its electoral and legal implications. Due to the ...political nature of the electoral petition, the judiciary is dragged into the ‘live wire’ of electoral politics, which brings their credibility and legitimacy into question. This study argues that the adversarial nature of judicial review makes it more likely for defeated political actors to impugn political bias in the administration of electoral justice, instead of adhering to the higher constitutional principles of popular sovereignty and natural justice. Based on content analyses of the different principles and interpretive methods underpinning the adjudication of the election petition, it distils some implications for the direction of judicial reforms and the emerging electoral jurisprudence. The paper demonstrates that the excessive executive powers in the appointment of procedures of judges’ revealed major cracks in the practice of judicial review. In sum, this study makes an important theoretical and empirical contribution to the current debates on the role of constitutional courts in the consolidation of democratic governance in African states.
Abstract
This Article grapples with the instrumentalization of the past in Romania, in the specific context of “judicial lustration” measures. It argues that decommunization and lustration policies, ...which could not be pursued in the immediate aftermath of the collapse of state socialism in 1989, were weaponized much later and used in order to advance other purposes. In 2006, an expedited judicial vetting procedure, in the context of the EU-driven fight against corruption, was repurposed by the center-right as a lustration instrument. In the same year, the dismantling of an intelligence service created after 1991 in the Justice Ministry (SIPA) to monitor ‘vulnerabilities’ in the justice system has set in motion a long series of failed attempts to bring closure to the question regarding the service’s archives, fomenting continuities of suspicion until today. More recently, in 2018, a form of ‘mock-judicial lustration’ has been used by the political left to deflect or at least delegitimize repressive anti-corruption policies. The new “lustration procedure” implicitly equated the recent cooperation between prosecutors and intelligence officers, in the context of the fight against corruption, with past practices of collusion between the members of the judiciary and the communist
Securitate
. These three episodes of ‘dealing with the past’ are reviewed in order to showcase path-dependencies. Such path-dependencies are not linked only with carryovers from or throwbacks to the communist past. Rather, pre- and post-communist deficiencies of modernization, combined more recently with gaps in post-accession monitoring by the EU Commission, create continuities of peripheral instrumentalism. Various narratives, such as decommunization, the fight against graft, judicial reform and the rule of law are used to legitimize short-term consequentialism, evincing a resilient, structural resistance to legislative and legal normativity.
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