Available in Russian
Author: Sergey Manzhosov
DOI: 10.21128/1812-7126-2023-3-45-71
Keywords: precedent; judicial law-making; stare decisis; jurisprudence constante; constitutional adjudication
Borrowing the doctrine of precedent has been the subject matter of heated debates in Russia for the last decade. Prominent scholars and judges of the highest courts of the land took part in it. Unfortunately, many arguments made during this exchange of opinions have not yet attracted proper attention from academia. Among other things, advocates of judicial precedent have ignored, for an unclear reason, the traditional objection that only established jurisprudence and not a separate judicial decision can be considered to be a source of law, while their opponents, in turn, have not tried to support this objection by any evidence, apparently holding it to be a self-evident truth. To get to the heart of this question, the dispute should be examined on the basis of a comparative analysis of the two doctrines of judicial rule-making: the common law doctrine of stare decisis and the continental one of jurisprudence constante. The rationale for one or the other doctrine might be found in its advantage in regard to basic constitutional principles and the legal order’s needs. But before such a functional analysis is possible, the content of both doctrines must be clarified. To this end, with reliance on available empirical data, the author conducts a critical reassessment of prevailing ideas about these doctrines. In this article, their normative facts – judicial decisions and established jurisprudence, respectively – are analyzed in turn. According to the author, the determinative characteristic must be the substratum of a normative fact: that it is a single precedent in the first case, while in the second one precedent is indefinitely multiple. In other respects, as a matter of principle, both doctrines show equal variability. In different countries and at different times interpretation of precedent as well as its overruling have been done according to different methods. Today, however, there is a noticeable convergence of doctrines: the common law doctrine demonstrates a fair amount of flexibility, while the continental one is gradually becoming a legal doctrine in a proper sense. Comprehension of this evolutionary process is hindered by legicentrism, a traditional mindset of many continental lawyers which mistakenly views legislation as the primary source, the model, and the exclusive guarantor of any law as such.
About the author: Sergey Manzhosov – Junior Research Fellow, Faculty of Law, Saint Petersburg State University, Saint Petersburg, Russia.
Citation: Manzhosov S. (2023) Pretsedent v konstitutsionnom prave: strukturnyy analiz stare decisis i jurisprudence constante [Precedent in constitutional law: a structural analysis of stare decisis and jurisprudence constante]. Sravnitel’noe konstitutsionnoe obozrenie, vol. 32, no. 3, pp. 45–71. (In Russian).
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