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The judicial system of the Russian Federation—especially its problems—are often gestured at in social scientific and regional studies scholarship, but rarely discussed in detail. Studies, even excellent ones, often simply note corruption, low perceived trust, and generically flawed institutions. Part of this is disciplinary assumptions: legal systems and their processes, procedures, authorities, and inner workings are often considered beside the point in non-democratic political regimes. As a result, the Russian judicial system is sometimes ignored unjustly in comparative scholarly conversations as well as in undergraduate and graduate syllabi. Fortunately, Kathryn Hendley and Peter H. Solomon, Jr., have produced a magisterial account of the contemporary Russian judicial system that is comprehensive, detailed, and helpfully accessible. The Judicial System of Russia, part of an Oxford University Press series on judicial systems worldwide, will undoubtedly be among the most effective and thorough primers on the subject for many years to come. Initial chapters review historical legacies, both deeper ones related to the Tsarist and Soviet systems, and the system's rebuilding in the late Soviet and post-Soviet period. Subsequent chapters deal with judges, lawyers, and public attitudes, as well as assessments of weaknesses, imperfections, and (perhaps most surprisingly) strengths since 1991. The third section dives into the administration of justice, highlighting justices of the peace, criminal, civil, business (arbitrazh), administrative, and constitutional courts with great depth and nuance. Throughout, the authors take a socio-legal approach, looking at both how the law is written and actually practiced. They rely on the heuristic framework of "legal dualism," noting that while characterizations of the Russian legal system as "deeply politized, hopelessly corrupt, and often incompetent" contain a kernel of truth, they are often overstated and rely on a very small fraction of the vast number of legal decisions made every year (p. 1). They describe a judicial system in which courts are "formally independent and powerful but where informal practices ensure that judges do not rule against regime interests" (p. 1). Thus, the day-to-day system, for its many faults, is more in keeping with the rule of law than expected, but political impositions ensure carve-outs for the powerful and for core regime interests. "Russia's courts are effective, that is both efficient and fair—in both reality and in popular perception in their handling of everyday disputes and, for the most part, in confronting crimes, accusatorial bias notwithstanding," they conclude (p. 199). Hendley and Solomon pay close attention to the evolution of the system, including the return of Tsarist institutions—such as trial by jury and justices of the peace—in the post-Soviet period, but also the maintenance of Soviet legacies like political control, regime loyalty, and constant bureaucratic evaluation of judges' performance. They chart a general reform process from the late Soviet period in 1988 through to the 2020 constitutional amendments. This reform period "concentrated on two large foci—judicial governance (including methods of selecting, promoting, and disciplining judges) and the courts themselves (including number and types, jurisdiction, procedural norms, staffing, administration, and technology)," ultimately moving from an emphasis on judicial independence to the accountability of judges and their control (p. 22). The book suggests that both reformist and counter-reformist impulses have existed under Vladimir Putin's long tenure. By the 2020s, this dynamic had created a system that broadly worked, albeit with some problems, while strengthening presidential power, asserting national sovereignty over international judicial bodies, and supporting a form of subordinate autonomy and greater professionalization within the judicial system overall. As they note, "the role of the presidency in judicial governance has increased, along with a corresponding decline in self-governance by the judicial community. Yet, the actual administration of justice has improved, often because of procedural and institutional changes, many of which were promoted by top judges" (p. 199). One surprise, in addition to the authors' overall positive take on the workings of the system for non-political issues, is the approachable nature of the system: "in contrast to some other countries, where the complexity of the procedural rules governing non-criminal cases makes proceeding without a lawyer unthinkable, the rules in Russia are user-friendly and their staff are often willing to help the uninitiated" (p. 77). While the book is quite comprehensive, there are some underdeveloped topics. Boris Yeltsin's constitutional coup in 1993 is treated very briefly. There is no sustained discussion of the Russian vision of a rechstaat and how it has been understood in Russian jurisprudence. Most unfortunately, the volume does not sufficiently adopt a thorough comparative approach, although it looms in the background. There are several times when the German or French judicial models are referred to, but we are never treated to a systematic account of exactly how much borrowing there is, or exactly when and why it happened, or even if it was intentional or unintended isomorphism (for example, when suggesting Russia has moved toward a French model of a weaker constitutional court with no published dissents). Similarly, the authors are a bit too tonally normative against continental "inquisitorial" models, and the book comes off as unnecessarily dismissive of Russia's choice to not move toward a more common-law approach. Finally, the book was published just as the Russo-Ukrainian War began and can only do so much to enlighten us on further evolutions in the Russian judicial system since. It thus does not address how the Russian judicial system changed during the period of wartime emergency, the further consolidation of a personalist dictatorship, and the large reductions in the prison population and the commutation of sentences through service in the war under the mercenary group PMC Wagner. These are not problems with the book, but opportunities for future studies. Overall, this is a fantastic contribution to English-language scholarship on the Russian judicial system. It will be essential for comparative legal research, studies in constitutional law, and judicial institutions, and will inform work on Russia's political and socio-legal systems. The authors are to be commended at producing such a useful and important volume, which sets the new standard for book-length treatments of Russia's judicial system.
Julian G. Waller (Sat,) studied this question.