Living Law, Legal Pluralism, and Corruption in Post-Soviet Uzbekistan

This paper aims to explore the multifaceted meaning, logic, and morality of informal transactions in order to better understand the social context that informs the meaning of corruption and bribery in post-Soviet Uzbekistan. It will be argued that the informal transactions in Uzbek society reflect different cultural and functional meanings from those in most of the Western world, and hence transactions that from a Western-centric perspective would be labelled as bribes can be morally accepted transactions in the Uzbek cultural context. If this is true, there may be reasons to re-evaluate the relevance of the Western-centric interpretations of corruption in the context of Uzbekistan, and possibly other Central Asian countries. These issues will be investigated with reference to observations and informal interviews from post-Soviet Uzbekistan. This study is based on three periods of ethnographic field research between 2009 and 2012 in the Ferghana Province of Uzbekistan. It draws on concepts of ‘living law’ and legal pluralism to provide a theoretical framework

Russia’s Legal Transitions: Marxist Theory, Neoclassical Economics and the Rule of Law

We review the role of economic theory in shaping the process of legal change in Russia during the two transitions it experienced during the course of the twentieth century: the transition to a socialist economy organised along the lines of state ownership of the means of production in the 1920s, and the transition to a market economy which occurred after the fall of the Soviet Union in the 1990s. Despite differences in methodology and in policy implications, Marxist theory, dominant in the 1920s, and neoclassical economics, dominant in the 1990s, offered a similarly reductive account of law as subservient to wider economic forces. In both cases, the subordinate place accorded to law undermined the transition process. Although path dependence and history are frequently invoked to explain the limited development of the rule of law in Russia during the 1990s, policy choices driven by a deterministic conception of law and economics also played a role.This is the author accepted manuscript. The final version is available from Springer via http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s40803-015-0012-

Perceptions of law and social order: a cross-national comparison of collective legal consciousness

The paper introduces the concept of collective legal consciousness, understood as the dominant perception of what law is and how people tend to relate to it in a given society. The author takes a constructivist approach in order to explore the way in which people in the society develop a distinct interpretation of how social order is organized, what role law plays in maintaining that order, and how it becomes embedded in everyday life. She contends that although collective legal consciousness at a societal level appears to be too complex to be subjected to analytical modeling, it is nevertheless possible to identify some of its dimensions. She further argues that each society develops over time a specific combination of those dimensions. The author uses empirical data from four countries, Bulgaria, England Poland and Norway, in order to show the way in which collective legal consciousness varies from one society to another

Justice Through Bureaucracy: The Ukrainian Model

This paper examines legal proceedings in the court of first instance for civil cases in Ukraine. Using ethnographic methodology, it demonstrates that a large part of a court judgement is predetermined by the institutional infrastructure and by practices established more widely in Ukrainian society. By observing case hearings and interviewing litigants and judges, the paper reveals that an unbridgeable gap separates a legal case, as constructed through documentary files, from the reality of life. This affects the very meaning of ‘evidence’ and the way that judicial decisions are made. The paper also illustrates the benefits of viewing a lower-level civil courtroom as a microcosm of a society, demonstrating that it provides rich insights into different layers of that society. </jats:p

Law and Informal Practices: The Post-Communist Experience

Law and Informal Practices is a work in socio-legal studies, examining the functions and effectiveness of law in the countries of the former Soviet Union. As the transition away from communism enters its second decade, the countries involved are confronted by an apparent failure of law. Understanding the newly formed social order in which law is powerless is a challenge to the assumptions of western jurisprudence. The contributors to this book take up that challenge. Using the framework of contemporary theory, ten specialists in different aspects of social science analyse the status of post-communist law from a variety of perspectives. Their emphasis is on the interplay between law and social norms, informal practices, and human values. Their work contributes to several of the wider ongoing debates in socio-legal studies: on the rule of law and its role in maintaining social order; on the interaction between law and social norms, relation between legitimacy and legality; and on the relative merits of solving problems by informal means such as networking or the use of intermediaries rather than by formal, institutionalised processes. At the same time, the book is intended to meet the needs of those interested not just in law but in the post-communist region. Blending theory with case studies, each contributor focuses on a single sector, such as the political system, worker-management relations, human rights, the machinery by which law is made and implemented, or the cultural and historical background of the societies under consideration. The majority of the chapters draw directly upon the authors' own experience and empirical research. Contributors to this volume - Professor Denis Galligan (Centre for Socio-Legal Studies, Oxford University): Dr. Marina Kurkchiyan (Centre for Socio-Legal Studies, Oxford University): Professor William Butler (School of Oriental and African Studies): Professor Neil MacFarlane (St. Anthony's College, Oxford University): Professor James L. Gibson (Washington University, St. Louis, Missouri): Dr. Sarah Ashwin (London School of Economics): Dr. Marat Shterin (London School of Economics): Dr. Frederique Dahan (European Bank for Reconstruction and Development): Dr. Scott Newton (School of Oriental and African Studies): Dr. Tom Ginsburg (University of Illinois, Champagne-Urbana, Illinois)