Published online by Cambridge University Press: 01 January 2024
This article explores why, throughout the 1990s, some Russian regions created their own constitutional courts and others did not. Contrary to current theories that assert that politicians create a strong and independent judiciary to protect them from the tyranny of election-winners in the context of political uncertainty, my analysis finds that constitutional courts emerged only in those regions where governors virtually guaranteed their re-election by consolidating their political power vis-à-vis federal and local governments. The article argues that both federal and regional politicians used the process of creating subnational constitutional courts to legitimize their federalism and judicial reforms. The changes in the balance of power between those governors, who aspired to have their own judicial system, and the federal government that insisted on a single federal judicial system, determined the variation in the process of court-building across Russian regions.
I thank the Centre for Russian and East European Studies and the School of Graduate Studies at the University of Toronto for their support of my research; Vera Bobrova, Larissa Chetverikova, Vladimir Kriazhkov, Mikhail Mitiukov, Robert Orttung, Tatiana Prokop'eva, Tatiana Shubert, Robert Sharlet, Peter Solomon, and justices and clerks of the Russian and the Komi Constitutional Courts for their helpful suggestions; the editors of the Law & Society Review; and the anonymous reviewers for their detailed critique of an earlier version of this article. Special thanks to Catalina Troshev for her useful comments and editorial assistance.