ABSTRACT

Recent confrontations between constitutional courts and parliamentary majorities, for example in Poland and Hungary, have attracted international interest in the relationship between the judiciary and the legislature in Central and Eastern European countries. Several political actors have argued that courts have assumed too much power after the democratic transformation process in 1989/1990. These claims are explicitly or implicitly connected to the charge that courts have constrained the room for manoeuvre of the legislatures too heavily and that they have entered the field of politics. Nevertheless, the question to what extent has this aggregation of power constrained the dominant political actors has never been examined accurately and systematically in the literature. The present volume fills this gap by applying an innovative research methodology to quantify the impact and effect of court’s decisions on legislation and legislators, and measure the strength of judicial decisions in six CEE countries.

chapter 1|7 pages

Introduction

chapter 2|24 pages

Research methodology

chapter 3|29 pages

The Czech Constitutional Court

Far away from political influence

chapter 4|35 pages

The German Federal Constitutional Court

Authority transformed into power?

chapter 5|30 pages

The Hungarian Constitutional Court

A constructive partner in constitutional dialogue

chapter 6|29 pages

The Polish Constitutional Tribunal

Deference beyond the veil of activism

chapter 7|29 pages

The Romanian Constitutional Court

Muddling through democratic transition

chapter 8|29 pages

The Slovak Constitutional Court

The third legislator?

chapter 9|34 pages

Courts compared

The practice of constitutional adjudication in Central and Eastern Europe