State-Building from Scratch? Transformations of Law in Crimea

• In Event: Law and Political Development: Learning about Politics from the Court Records

Abstract

How does the state establish its justice system? How does the behavior of law respond to fundamental political transformations? The incorporation of Crimea and Sebastopol, whose population used to live under Ukrainian jurisdiction, into the Russian legal system in 2014 present a unique setting to study these questions. In this paper, we explore the behavior of law in Crimea under Ukrainian and de facto Russian jurisdictions. We focus in particular on commercial courts that handle all economic disputes and are characterized by the high quality of digitized court decisions. This focus allows us to study the transformation of state-society and state-business relations under profound political change. Using original datasets of Ukrainian and Russian court decisions, we explore how the outcomes of commercial court cases changed in Crimea under the de facto Russian jurisdiction. Most importantly, we analyze the chances of the government winning vis-à-vis business. To address selection into litigation problem, we leverage data from two levels of judicial hierarchy and compare decisions between regional and appellate courts. We also compare the outcomes of court cases in Crimea with Ukrainian regions prior to 2014 and the regions of Russia after 2014. Finally, we compare the decisions of judges who were reappointed from the Ukrainian judicial system versus judges who were appointed by the Russian authorities after 2014.

Authors

• Egor Lazarev, Yale

• Anton Sobolev, University of Texas at Dallas