This article focuses on constitutional developments and legal policies in Central Europe since 1989 and elaborates on their temporal analysis with special emphasis on the distinction between demos and ethnos in the political and legal discourse. Using various social theories of time, identity, and codification of social traditions, I argue that the difference between civility and ethnicity does not involve simply a conflict between liberal democratic aspirations and ethno-nationalist myths of authoritarian politics, but rather represents two distinct traditions manipulated by political agents and codified in the process of recent constitution-making. The process of selecting different traditions and political manipulations of the past is reflected at the level of both constitutional symbolism and specific governmental policies in post-Communist Hungary, Slovakia, Poland, and the Czech Republic. The final part of the text analyzes relations between the abstract symbolic language of constitutional documents and concrete, “ethnos-” based legal policies implemented in these countries of Central Europe.

In this article, I analyze two cases where the Turkish Constitutional Court dissolved political parties during the 1990s. Specifically, I examine the cases against the Islamist Refah (Welfare/Well-Being) Party and the pro-Kurdish Halkin Emek Partisi (People's Labor Party). While the former was charged with threatening the secular basis of the national social order, the charges against the latter were around its allegedly separatist character. I engage in an in-depth analysis of the lines of argument in the indictments, arguments of defense deployed by the parties, and their ultimate contestations as they appeared in the final decisions by the Court. I see the Court as engaging with a medley of themes and tendencies, [trying to resolve them for the case at hand]. I argue that despite the differences in the construction of the alleged threats, in both cases the Court deployed a similar image of the ways in which social, political, and judicial terrains interact. A rather arbitrary boundary between the political and cultural domains informs these decisions. The Court operates with the understanding that once this boundary is transgressed, what may be harmless when an issue is cultural—such as the use of the headscarf or of the Kurdish language—may turn into a political symbol threatening the basis of the united, democratic, and progressive nation-state. In this vision, the concepts of democracy, progress, and unity are intimately tied together such that the threat to one of these concepts almost simultaneously constitutes a threat to the other two. The Court imagines itself as protecting the boundary between the political and cultural domains in an effort to uphold the right of a democracy to protect itself. This line of thought also enables the court's rather routine involvement in the political domain—which has brought about eighteen decisions for political party dissolution since 1980.

Many constitutional courts, particularly in Central and Eastern Europe, have more power than the “constrained court” model of judicial decisionmaking suggests because they operate in an increasingly international environment. By analyzing the Estonian Supreme Court's adjudication of minority linguistic rights, we show how even a new court can act as a “conduit” for democratic reform by identifying for legislators national constitutional paths along which domestically disliked but internationally defined democratic reforms can be pursued, preserving national integrity while acknowledging international reality. International pressures, while constraining courts, thus can free them from national constraints while allowing them to imprint their own vision.

This analysis examines supranational constitutionalism in the European Union (EU). In particular, the study focuses on the role of the European Court of Justice in the creation of women's rights. I examine the interaction between the Court and member state governments in legal integration, and also the integral role that women's advocates—both individual activists and groups—have played in the development of EU social provisions. The findings suggest that this litigation dynamic can have the effect of fueling the integration process by creating new rights that may empower social actors and EU organizations, with the ultimate effect of diminishing member state government control over the scope and direction of EU law. This study focuses specifically on gender equality law yet provides a general framework for examining the case law in subsequent legal domains, with the purpose of providing a more nuanced understanding of supranational governance and constitutionalism.

This article explores why, throughout the 1990s, some Russian regions created their own constitutional courts and others did not. Contrary to current theories that assert that politicians create a strong and independent judiciary to protect them from the tyranny of election-winners in the context of political uncertainty, my analysis finds that constitutional courts emerged only in those regions where governors virtually guaranteed their re-election by consolidating their political power vis-à-vis federal and local governments. The article argues that both federal and regional politicians used the process of creating subnational constitutional courts to legitimize their federalism and judicial reforms. The changes in the balance of power between those governors, who aspired to have their own judicial system, and the federal government that insisted on a single federal judicial system, determined the variation in the process of court-building across Russian regions.

This article assesses the power of judges in Russia (on courts of general jurisdiction, arbitrazh courts, and military courts) in dealing with cases in which the government or one of its officials is a party. Power, that is, the resources of judges to make binding decisions, is understood as including jurisdiction, discretion, and authority to ensure compliance. The article analyzes the dramatic growth of jurisdiction and caseload in administrative justice in post-Soviet Russia to the year 2002 and examines how the courts have performed in handling the review of actions by officials (including in the military), tax cases, electoral disputes, and the legality of normative acts (both regulations and laws of lower governments), especially in the late 1990s. High rates of success for persons bringing suits against the government suggest that judges were able by and large to adjudicate fairly and rule against the state. To a considerable degree (but not always), those decisions were implemented (more often than were constitutional and commercial decisions). Interestingly, citizens who challenged the actions of officials in court had much more success than those who brought complaints to the Procuracy. Finally, the article develops an agenda for future research that would deepen understanding of the significance of administrative justice in the Russian Federation and the power of judges.

The article investigates the impact of legal mobilization and judicial decisions on official minority-language education (OMLE) policy in the Canadian provinces outside Quebec, using the “factor-oriented” and “dispute-centered” theories of judicial impact developed by U.S. scholars. The Canadian Supreme Court's decision in Mahé v. Alberta (1990), which broadly interpreted Section 23 of the Charter of Rights to include management and control of OMLE programs and schools, along with federal funding to the provinces to implement OMLE policy, are important to explaining OMLE policy change as predicted by the factor-oriented approach. The dispute-centered approach, on the other hand, helps us understand how the Charter of Rights and judicial decisions shaped the goals and discourse of Francophone groups in the policy process and, more instrumentally, provided opportunity structures that Francophone groups exploited effectively. The article concludes that both approaches to explaining judicial impact could be accommodated within an institutional model of judicial impact that construes institutions as state actors, as sets of rules, and as frameworks of meaning and interpretation. Such an approach would allow for the development of a more comparative model of judicial impact.