Publication details
Judicial Resistance: The Shield and The Sword of Informality
| Authors | |
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| Year of publication | 2024 |
| Type | Chapter of a book |
| MU Faculty or unit | |
| Citation | |
| Description | How do courts react to political interferences? A lot has been written on populist and autocratic leaders rigging the courts. Last decades are full of examples showing that courts can indeed be an easy target for governments enjoying large parliamentary majorities and little respect to the rule of law. Examples from Hungary, Poland, Slovakia, Ukraine, Turkey, Bolivia, or the USA confirm that political leaders skilfully navigate through a set of informal and formal strategies how to manipulate courts’s composition and decision-making. Nevertheless, only minor attention has so far been devoted to judicial reactions to political interferences. As this chapter demonstrates, courts are no passive observers of court-rigging efforts. On the contrary, they do retaliate implementing a wide scope of strategies going way beyond formal legal review of their government’s actions. This chapter analyses examples of judicial reactions to political interferences and zeroes in on the role of informal tools, practices and techniques in building democratic resilience of courts. Offering a categorization of resistance strategies, it argues that many resistance techniques in fact rely on informal networks and and alliances judges form within the courts (at domestic and supranational level) and with other non-judicial actors. The chapter hence offers a unique view at resistance via informality and extra-judicial activities that help judges form resistance alliances and decrease the window of opportunity of erosion actors to attack and strip them of power. |
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