Populism and the Rule of Law in Everyday Judicial Practices

• In Event: Judicial Politics in Europe

Abstract

The paper will analyze the effects of recent judicial reforms on everyday judicial practices in Hungary and Poland.
It will start from the assumption that, in the shadow of larger institutional changes widely discussed in discourses of political science and constitutional law, there are also subtle shifts in the everyday organisational practices in the judicial system triggered by the reforms, which might be equally important to understand whether the justice
system retains its independence and whether the rule of law is upheld. Such practices could only be explored empirically and qualitatively. The project will thus combine legal analysis with semi-structured interviews with prosecutors, judges and other stakeholders such as policymakers.
The paper is the presentation of the preliminary results of a larger project which - using Ernst Fraenkel's concept of the Dual State - aims to provide a more empirically grounded account of challenges presented by authoritarian populism to the rule of law in Central Eastern Europe. Although this has been done before to describe the operation of the law in countries with more overtly authoritarian states like Singapore, Russia, Egypt, Chile and
others, the project will argue the findings of these studies are not directly applicable to EU-member constitutional democracies of Central and Eastern Europe.

Author

• Csaba Györy, ELTE University Faculty of Law, Budapest /Institute of Legal Studies, Centre for Social Sciences, Hu