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.
Table of Contents
List of figures
List of tables
List of abbreviations
List of contributors
1. Constitutional review and judicial-legislative relations in new democracies, Kálmán Pócza – Márton Csapodi – Gábor Dobos – Attila Gyulai
2. The Croatian Constitutional Court: From a potentially powerful court to a court of rejections, Monika Glavina
3. The Czech Constitutional Court: The inconspicuous constrainer, Katarina Šipulová and Alžbeta Králová
4. The Estonian Supreme Court: strength by pragmatic collegiality, Paloma Krõõt Tupay
5. The Hungarian Constitutional Court: Dialogue in practice, Attila Gyulai – Gábor Dobos – Kálmán Pócza
6. The Latvian Constitutional Court: Dialogue and cooperation among constitutional bodies, Anita Rodiņa – Dita Plepa
7. The Lithuanian Constitutional Court: The gradual emergence of a strong guardian, Dovilė Pūraitė-Andrikienė
8. The Polish Constitutional Tribunal: Encountering Politics, Artur Wolek – Iga Jeziorska
9. The Romanian Constitutional Court: Layers of constitutional adjudication, Csongor Kuti
10. The Slovak Constitutional Court: The promise of Dworkinian adjudication?, Max Steuer – Erik Láštic
11. The Slovenian Constitutional Court: Courage in times of political instability, Polona Batagelj
12. Central and Eastern European constitutional courts in comparative perspective 1990-2020, Kálmán Pócza – Márton Csapodi – Gábor Dobos – Attila Gyulai
Editor(s)
Biography
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.
