Guides and Guardians: judiciaries in times of transition
Publikation: Bidrag til bog/antologi/rapport › Bidrag til bog/antologi › Forskning › fagfællebedømt
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Guides and Guardians : judiciaries in times of transition. / Afsah, Ebrahim.
Judges as Guardians of Constitutionalism and Human Rights. red. / Martin Scheinin; Helle Krunke; Marina Aksenova. London : Edward Elgar Publishing, 2016. s. 251-277.Publikation: Bidrag til bog/antologi/rapport › Bidrag til bog/antologi › Forskning › fagfællebedømt
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TY - CHAP
T1 - Guides and Guardians
T2 - judiciaries in times of transition
AU - Afsah, Ebrahim
PY - 2016
Y1 - 2016
N2 - Despite the scholarly and official agreement that effective legal institutions matter a great deal, there are no universally valid rules about how public administrations, including courts and the law enforcement agencies on which the execution of their verdicts rests, should be reformed. While most good solutions to public administration problems will share certain common features and broadly similar institutional design, they will have to incorporate highly contextual information about local culture, legal traditions, existing administrative patterns, etc. In this respect, public administration and legal reform ‘is necessarily more of an art than a science’ requiring the careful balancing of existing structures against the visionary endpoint of reform.Under these conditions, the judiciary, especially at the highest level, cannot content itself to measure state action against an abstract yardstick. Instead, judiciaries must also assume the role of guides offering direction and reassurance to hostile societal actors about the transition process as such. As will be argued below, judges can offer such guidance much more credibly if they visibly have a grand vision for the erection of the legal edifice, something that the new constitutional courts in Central and Eastern Europe readily found in the practice of their Western European, especially German colleagues, but something that was weaker in Russia and entirely lacking in Egypt and the Arab world.
AB - Despite the scholarly and official agreement that effective legal institutions matter a great deal, there are no universally valid rules about how public administrations, including courts and the law enforcement agencies on which the execution of their verdicts rests, should be reformed. While most good solutions to public administration problems will share certain common features and broadly similar institutional design, they will have to incorporate highly contextual information about local culture, legal traditions, existing administrative patterns, etc. In this respect, public administration and legal reform ‘is necessarily more of an art than a science’ requiring the careful balancing of existing structures against the visionary endpoint of reform.Under these conditions, the judiciary, especially at the highest level, cannot content itself to measure state action against an abstract yardstick. Instead, judiciaries must also assume the role of guides offering direction and reassurance to hostile societal actors about the transition process as such. As will be argued below, judges can offer such guidance much more credibly if they visibly have a grand vision for the erection of the legal edifice, something that the new constitutional courts in Central and Eastern Europe readily found in the practice of their Western European, especially German colleagues, but something that was weaker in Russia and entirely lacking in Egypt and the Arab world.
M3 - Book chapter
SN - 9781785365850
SP - 251
EP - 277
BT - Judges as Guardians of Constitutionalism and Human Rights
A2 - Scheinin, Martin
A2 - Krunke, Helle
A2 - Aksenova, Marina
PB - Edward Elgar Publishing
CY - London
ER -
ID: 181575964