Hope Springs Eternal Even On The Very Brink Of Winter

Russian Constitutional Court file photo

Date: Wed, 27 Nov 2013
Subject: Hope Springs Eternal Even On The Very Brink Of Winter
From: Robert Teets <rmtlaw@gmail.com>

Hope Springs Eternal Even On The Very Brink Of Winter

Today saw the first snowfall in Moscow, albeit with its melting as soon as the snowflakes touched the still unfrozen earth. With a constitutional jubilee soon to be upon us, news accounts and the chatter in legal circles has been fittingly bleak in the classic wintry sense with the prospect of what are widely perceived to be prospective negative changes to the 1993 Russian federal Constitution, numerous of whose better legal provisions have yet to be fully implemented and realized.

Among these feared changes are ones (which are contained in Bill No. 352924-6 that has already successfully passed the requisite three readings in the State Duma and gone forward to the Federation Council) that will meld together the present arbitrazh commercial courts (with a High Arbitrazh Court at its apex) with the courts of general jurisdiction (with the Russian Supreme Court at its apex) see William E. Butler, Russian Law (3rd edition, Oxford, 2009) §§6.12-6.83; William Burnham, Peter B. Maggs, et alia, Law & Legal System Of The Russian Federation (5th edition, Juris, 2012) pp. 53-89.

This week plus the next–­in the run-up to the 20th jubilee fette on the 12th of December–­are legal convention and symposium heavy e.g.,, a 14th annual conference of law school faculties; the 2nd national legal congress under the auspices of the Russian Agency For Legal & Judicial Information (RAPSI).

In attending the first of the foregoing at Moscow State University in a spanking-new law faculty, multi-storied complex, I eagerly awaited the keynote from one of my favorite Russian jurists, the chairman of the 19-judges comprising the Russian Constitutional Court, Valeriy Dmitrievich Zorkin. His touted theme was problems in the development of constitutional law in Russia.

Within moments of his taking the podium, I was feeling quite frustrated owing to a combination of a mediocre sound-system plus Valeriy Dmitrievich’s habit of turning away from the microphone in order to be courteous and to speak toward his good colleagues seated on the stage beside him­–so much so that I could hardly follow his words, much less his thoughts.

Feeling flummoxed, I turned to the conference program and its list of the speakers, noting that the name of the next speaker was familiar to me although I could not remember the context. Certainly his titles were most imposing­–adviser to the President of the Russian Federation–­but that did not trigger a metaphorical “light bulb” of recognition of Veniamin Fedorovich Yakovlev, which “lit-up”  only after the end of the day, after I had gotten home, and ruminated further.

More truthfully, that was after I did an Internet search ­does that make me and my nominally prodigious learning just another example of Daniel Kahneman’s bane: SYSTEM ONE­lazy (see, Thinking Fast & Slow, Farrar, Straus, & Giroux, 2011).

Yakovlov preceded Ivanov as the chair of the High Arbitrazh Court. Ergo, his soothing ideas and words were not merely an artful demonstration of cunning rhetoric–­he was speaking about” his” own personal and markedly superior court system that therefore is hopefully not just being swept-up for disposal in the proverbial “dustbin” of good, even great, ideas being squandered.

Early this evening, RAPSI released a list of five-myths about the pending Russian judicial reform that is both timely and the more complicated explanation of what is (hopefully) really going on see, (http://www.rapsinews.com/publications/20131126/269861221.html).

Robert Marvin Teets, Jr.
jurist (LL.M. Institute of State & Law, Russian Academy of Sciences),
attorney-at-law (J.D. Hastings College of the Law, University of California)
State Bar of California (Active Member)

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