Constitutional Review in Central and Eastern Europe

This book examines the extent to which the aggregation of power, in the relationship between the judiciary and the legislature, may have constrained dominant political actors' room for manoeuvre. Contributors elaborate a methodology to give a nuanced picture of constitutional adjudication in Central and Eastern Europe between 1990 and 2020.

Recent confrontations between constitutional courts and parliamentary majorities in several European countries have attracted international interest in the relationship between the judiciary and the legislature.

Some political actors have argued that courts have assumed too much power and politics has been extremely judicialized. This volume accurately and systematically examines the extent to which this aggregation of power may have constrained the dominant political actors' room for manoeuvre. To explore the diversity and measure the strength of judicial decisions, the contributors to this work have elaborated a methodology to give a more nuanced picture of the practice of constitutional adjudication in Central and Eastern Europe between 1990 and 2020. The work opens with an assessment of the existing literature on empirical analysis of judicial decisions with a special focus on the Central and Eastern European region, and a short summary of the methodology of the project. This is followed by ten country studies and a concluding chapter providing a comprehensive comparative analysis of the results. A further nine countries are explored in the counterpart volume to this book: Constitutional Review in Western Europe: Judicial-Legislative Relations in Comparative Perspective.

The collection will be an invaluable resource for those working in the areas of empirical legal research and comparative constitutional law, as well as political scientists interested in judicial politics.

Chapters 1, 5 and 12 of this book are freely available as a downloadable Open Access PDF at http://www.taylorfrancis.com under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives (CC BY-NC-ND) 4.0 license.

Autorentext

Kálmán Pócza is Senior Research Fellow at the Ludovika University of Public Service in Budapest, Research Institute for Politics and Government, and Head of the Center for Constitutional Politics at the Mathias Corvinus Collegium, Hungary. He is the Principal Investigator of the JUDICON-EU project.

Inhalt

1. Constitutional Review and Judicial-legislative Relations in New Democracies; 2. The Croatian Constitutional Court: From a Potentially Powerful Court to a Court of Rejections; 3. The Czech Constitutional Court: The Inconspicuous Constrainer; 4. The Estonian Supreme Court: strength by pragmatic collegiality; 5. The Hungarian Constitutional Court: Dialogue in Practice; 6. Constitutional Court of the Republic of Latvia: Dialogue and Cooperation among Constitutional Bodies; 7. The Lithuanian Constitutional Court: The Gradual Emergence of a Strong Guardian; 8. The Polish Constitutional Tribunal: Encountering Politics; 9. The Romanian Constitutional Court: Layers of Constitutional Adjudication; 10. The Slovak Constitutional Court: The Promise of Dworkinian Adjudication?; 11. The Slovenian Constitutional Court: Courage in Times of Political Instability; 12. Central and Eastern European Constitutional Courts in Comparative Perspective 1990-2020