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

Session Submission Type: Full Paper Panel

Session Description

How did empires use law to control their colonies? How does the state establish its justice system in the peripheries? How do insurgent groups use law and courts to build legitimacy? How does corruption affect property rights? This panel will discuss the central questions of political development – state-building, center-periphery relations, legitimacy, corruption – through the lenses of law and courts. A particular methodological focus of the panel is on the analysis of large datasets of judicial records – both archival and contemporary. Edgar Franco-Vivanco will present co-authored work with Fiona Shen-Bayh on the imperial strategies of control of colonial elites through law using unique archival data on the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council, the court of final appeal for British Overseas Territories. The presentation will focus on the interpretation and resolution of conflicts from African appellants. Jordan Gans-Morse will present co-authored work with David Szakonyi, on the effects of corruption on the resolution of business disputes in commercial courts of Moscow. Using income and asset disclosures to create unique individual-level measures of corruption for court judges and relying on random distribution of cases across judges in nearly 2 million decisions from 2011-2018, the authors show that corrupt judges are more likely to find in favor of wealthier litigants, back private firms in their disputes with government agencies, and rush in passing down decisions. Egor Lazarev will present co-authored work on the legal ramifications of the drastic political change – forced incorporation of Crimea and Sebastopol in the Russian Federation in 2014. Using the data from the same commercial courts that are studied in Gans-Morse and Szakonyi’s work, the study explores the transformation of state-society and state-business relations under profound political change. The analysis compares judicial decisions in Crimea under Ukrainian and de facto Russian jurisdiction and also compares judges from were reappointed in 2014 with the new ones. Mara Revkin will present her book project on ISIS’ legality and its role in the perceptions of the group state-building project in Iraq and Syria. She will document how ISIS offered an alternative system of law and order, including its own courts, police, and legislation-like rules— that initially appealed to a critical mass of Syrians and Iraqis. The research is based on qualitative and quantitative data collected over the course of more than two years of field research including an original household survey; in-depth interviews, and a dataset of more than 1,500 Arabic primary source documents.

Maria Popova, a leading specialist in law and courts and political transformations will chair the panel and discuss the presentations.

Sub Unit

• Division 12: Comparative Politics of Developing Countries

Individual Presentations

• Power and Property under Empire - Edgar Franco Vivanco, University of Michigan; Fiona Shen-Bayh, William & Mary

• Corruption and Property Rights in Russia - Jordan Luc Gans-Morse, Northwestern University; David Szakonyi, Higher School of Economics

• Insurgent Legality: The Rise and Failure of the Islamic State - Mara Revkin, Duke University School of Law

• State-Building from Scratch? Transformations of Law in Crimea - Egor Lazarev, Yale; Anton Sobolev, University of Texas at Dallas

Chair

• Maria Popova McGill University

Discussants

• Maria Popova McGill University

• Diana Kapiszewski Georgetown University