Suchergebnisse

As communism was collapsing, both the discipline of political science and American foreign policy were becoming captivated by two concepts—the third wave of democratization and the democratic peace. The third wave of democratization is the "worldwide movement to democracy" that occurred in more than thirty countries during the decade and a half that began with the Portuguese coup of 1974. The democratic peace is the special peace that develops among liberal states "because they exercise democratic caution and are capable of appreciating the international rights of foreign republics."

To most Western observers Soviet penal policy means Stalin's labor camps, and what is known about the camps comes from the writings of Alexander Solzhenitsyn. In our admiration of Solzhenitsyn's portrayal of the camps, however, we ought not to accept on faith his version of Soviet penal history. Solzhenitsyn treats Soviet penal practice before 1929 simply as a stage in the development of the camps. He finds the roots of Stalin's camps in Lenin's Russia, and from those roots, he argues, the camps developed steadily and inevitably. To be sure, with hindsight one can plausibly regard the civil war camps as precedent for the later ones and the camps of Solovki during the 1920s as the embryo from which the Stalinist camps grew. But to look only at these developments is to take a selective or partial view of early Soviet penal history, for the civil war period contained the embryo of another penal policy, a progressive policy, which differed radically from that practiced by the Cheka and OGPU. And it was this progressive policy, not the Cheka's approach, which gained the predominant position during the NEP years.

Examines changes in civil and criminal law and in the judiciary, in context of the needs of a market economy, and how the haste with which they have been introduced has contributed to a rise in organized crime; 1990-94. Some focus on public opinion regarding the judiciary and legal processes.

"Courts in Russia present a conundrum. The conventional wisdom paints a dismal picture, portraying them as deeply politicized, hopelessly corrupt, and often incompetent. There is more than a kernel of truth in this image. Powerful actors in the Russian Federation have proven themselves capable of influencing and even dictating the outcome of cases that interest them through political pressure and/or financial payoffs. The dictates of the law can take a back seat to the parochial concerns of the powerful. Although such cases dominate the media coverage of the courts and, consequently, have come to serve as the popular image of courts for many observers, in Russia and beyond, their actual numbers are small. Of the millions of cases that Russian courts hear every year, the vast majority are of interest only to those involved. In these everyday cases, judges hew closely to the law. Indeed, on occasion their positivistic adherence to the letter of the law blinds them to the underlying equities of a case"--

It is hardly a revelation to say that in the Soviet Union, law served not as the foundation of government but as an instrument of rule, or that the judiciary in that country was highly dependent upon political authority. Yet, experience shows that effective democracies and market economies alike require courts that are independent and trusted. In Courts and Transition in Russia, Solomon and Foglesong analyze the state and operation of the courts in Russia and the in some ways remarkable progress of their reform since the end of Soviet power. Particular attention is paid to the struggles of reformers to develop judicial independence and to extend the jurisdiction of the courts to include constitutional and administrative disputes as well as supervision of pretrial investigations. The authors then outline what can and should be done to make courts in Russia autonomous, powerful, reliable, efficient, accessible and fair. The book draws upon extensive field research in Russia, including the results of a lengthy questionnaire distributed to district court judges throughout Russian Federation.Written in a clear and direct manner, Courts and Transition in Russia should appeal to anyone interested in law, politics, or business in Russia ? scholars and practitioners alike ? as well as to students of comparative law, legal transition, and courts in new democracies.