Katarina Sipulova

• MSt, PhD
• Head of Department at Masaryk University

How can courts resist political attacks? Despite the rich empirical studies of attacks on courts, we lack better understanding of how judges react to these challenges. Little or no attention has been paid to the theoretical aspects of judicial resistance; the structural, personal or socio‐economical motives of judges, or the dynamics between the re...

This introductory Article provides a conceptual umbrella for the Special Issue on Informal Institutions and Democratic Decay. It offers conceptual clarity to studying informal institutions and explains their relationship to other concepts such as constitutional conventions or judicial culture. The article summarizes findings of the Special issue in...

De-democratization may take the form of executive-led attacks as well as incremental decrepitude, gradual emptying of underlying constitutional values, and state inertia. Contrary to general wisdom, both exogenous erosion and endogenous decay are heavily affected by informality. As courts are often the first institutions affected by de-democratizat...

This article uses the case study of Slovakia and its lackluster experience with a judge-dominated judicial council to demonstrate that formal institutions have only limited impact on the ideational level. We show that the transformation of the Slovak post-communist judiciary relied on the presumption that judges‘ interests are automatically complem...

Judges play a key role in the implementation of transitional justice mechanisms. Yet, less attention has been paid so far to the question of how to address their collaboration with non-democratic regimes. In theory, judges can be subjected to virtually all transitional justice mechanisms ranging from criminal prosecution and lustration to truth-see...

Judicial councils – separation of powers – fourth-branch institutions – judicial independence – four ideal types of judicial councils – a judge-controlled, politician-controlled, inter-branch and fourth-branch judicial council – danger of politicisation and corporativism of the judiciary

This open access book asks whether there is space for particularism in a constitutional democracy which would limit the implementation of EU law. National identity claims are a key factor in shaping our times and the ongoing evolution of the European Union. To assess their impact this collection focuses on the jurisprudence of Czechia, Hungary, Pol...

The chapter on the Slovak Constitutional Court (SCC) demonstrates that constitutional courts may develop their reading of constitutional identity in a reactive way. The lack of textual hooks in the text of the Slovak Constitution, combined with experience of political unrest, tradition of judicial minimalism, and dominance of separation of powers d...

In the wake of Donald Trump’s presidency, a fierce discussion over expanding the US Supreme Court erupted. However, the expansion of a court’s membership is just one of several court-packing techniques. Moreover, the American debate is peculiar due to the unique features of the US Supreme Court. The aim of this article is to look at court-packing f...

The proliferation of court-packing wars across different political regimes has recently stirred up a lot of controversy. As one of the techniques allowing executive actors swiftly to capture the courts, align them with their own political preferences or even weaponise them against their opponents, court-packing is particularly tempting for both dem...

The aim of this article is to introduce a novel view on how to evaluate the share of power held by judges in judicial governance. Its contribution to court administration and the regulation of judges is three-fold. First, it provides a novel empirically tested conceptualization of judicial governance that includes 60 competences grouped into eight...

Příspěvek konceptualizuje pojem čtvrté moci, kterým bývají označované orgány podílející se na vládnutí, které nelze jednoduše zařadit do žádné z větví klasických tří mocí. Příspěvek pojem čtvrté moci vymezuje, zamýšlí se nad jeho teoretickou podstatou a rozebírá jeho vztah k principu dělby moci. Jeho hlavní argument spočívá v tom, že byť myšlenka č...

Tento příspěvek je koncipován jako odpověď autorů monografie Domestic Judicial Treatment of European Court of Human Rights Case Law: Beyond Compliance (KOSAŘ, D. et al. Routledge, 2020) na reakce komentátorů v tomto sympoziu. Rekapitulujeme východiska monografie a rozvíjíme některé v knize obsažené argumenty s ohledem na připomínky komentátorů. Člá...

I přesto, že diskuse o Nejvyšší radě soudnictví (NRS) trvá už několik dekád, komplexní analýza toho, jaké postoje ke zřízení NRS zastávají klíčoví aktéři, kterých se samospráva soudnictví týká – soudci, politici a praktikující právníci – doposud chybí. Cílem tohoto textu je tuto mezeru vyplnit a na základě rozhovorů se zástupci českých právnických,...

The article sheds light on the role of constitutional courts in transitional justice, focusing on their role in mitigating the conflicts between transitional justice and international human rights commitments. Through a study of the Czech Constitutional Court’s case law, we demonstrate that international human rights work both as a constraint and a...

Mít na klíčových postech v soudní moci názorově spřízněné soudce a omezit vliv těch opačně smýšlejících chce řada politiků. Někteří z nich však nechtějí čekat na přirozenou obměnu. Političtí lídři proto často dojdou k závěru, že jedinou cestou, jak takové názorové spřízněnosti v dohledné době dosáhnout, je změnu složení stávajících soudů urychlit....

Whether we like it or not, court-packing has flourished all over the world. Bolivian, Hungarian, Polish, and Turkish as well as Venezuelan political leaders have recently employed various strategies to stack their courts with loyal judges. Even in consolidated democracies, such as the United States, the possibility of court-packing is discussed wit...

The article discusses the development in the administration of the Slovak judiciary since the separation of Czechoslovakia and the impact of the empowerment of the judicial selfgovernance on the functioning of the judicial system. After independence, the administration of the judiciary initially rested in the hands of the executive. In 2002, Slo...

Judicial councils are often presented as a panacea for many disorders of judicial systems, including low public confidence in the judiciary. Nevertheless, the assessment of their impact has so far been neglected. The article offers a unique view on the relationship between judicial councils and the level of public confidence in courts. It draws a...

The concept of judicial compliance has attracted plenty of attention in the last two decades. Yet, despite the growing scholarly interest, important research questions remain largely unresolved. This is partly due to the persistent use of unsystematic research, built on the cherry picking of cases. The content of only a few well-known judgments has...

What motivates States to commit to international human rights treaties remains an unanswered question in political science. Many tentative explanations for the observed variation in ratification patterns have been proposed; some are based on intrinsic characteristics of the treaties (the substance of the protected rights and the control mechanism);...

The publication deals with implementation of decisions of international human rights bodies in the Czech Republic and Slovakia. The book discusses the role of international human rights case-law in the work of courts, legislators and executives.

The rise of abusive constitutionalism in Central and Eastern Europe (CEE) has hit the domestic judiciaries particularly hard. Viktor Orbán expanded the size of the Constitutional Court and then packed it, made sure that he can install a new president of the Constitutional Court, ousted the Supreme Court president through a constitutional amendment,...

The review essay discusses current critical approaches towards international human rights regimes and categorises them according to their normative, functional, and methodological bases. The paper builds on four recent books which are examples of current relevant positions in human rights scholarship. The books focus, respectively, on a critical ex...

What motivates states to commit to international human rights treaties remains a contested question in political and legal science. Many tentative explanations for the observed variation in ratification patterns have been proposed. Some are based on the content of the treaties (the substance of the protected rights and the control mechanisms), othe...

The study finds that the strength of a human-rights treaty’s control mechanism moderates the effect of the political regime on how states commit to HR treaties. Empirical test of the “moderation effect hypothesis” showed that the overall speed of the commitment process of communist Czechoslovakia and newer democratic regimes (CR and SR) was quite s...

The European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR) is often portrayed as the most developed regional human rights court, one which wields the power to influence practices in its Member States. In 2007, the Grand Chamber of the Court issued a famous ruling in the case DH v Czech Republic, which condemned discrimination of Roma children in education. The pro...

Conformity with human rights norms is currently a standard component of democratic states’ policies. However, this conformity is reflected not only in domestic binding catalogues of human rights embodied in constitutions, but also in the continuous rise of international control and treaty commitments. States are widely expected to commit to and rat...

This article deals with issues of transitional justice in selected Central European countries. The relationship between the mode of democratic transition and the mechanisms and pace of transitional justice processes is discussed. The main focus is on the analysis and comparison of transitional justice issues in three Central European countries – th...