ABSTRACT
When Mikhail Gorbachev presented the final version of the reforms to chapter 12 and onwards of the 1977 USSR Constitution to the USSR Supreme Soviet on November 29 1988, he noted that there were a number of corrections which had been made to the draft law. The major change which the perestroika of the constitution has introduced is the establishment, for the first time, of Congresses of People’s Deputies at USSR, union-republic, and autonomous republic levels. The resolutions actually passed by the Party Conference continued the momentum towards constitutional change. The draft Law of the USSR on Changes in and Additions to the Constitution of the USSR was published in Pravda, Izvestiia and other leading Soviet newspapers on Saturday 22 October 1988. Under the original draft, judges were to be elected by the soviet of people’s deputies of the same administrative level as the court in which they would sit.
