Kaja Gadowska & Peter H. Solomon Jr. 
Legal Change in Post-Communist States 
Progress, Reversions, Explanations

Reformers had high hopes that the end of communism in Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union would lead to significant improvements in legal institutions and the role of law in public administration. However, the cumulative experience of 25 years of legal change since communism has been mixed, marked by achievements and failures, advances and moves backward. This book—written by a team of socio-legal scholars—probes the nuances of this process and starts the process to explain them. It covers developments across the former Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, and it deals with both legal institutions (courts and police) and accountability to law in public administration, including anti-corruption activities. In explaining their findings, the authors probe the impact of such factors as the type of political regime (democratic to authoritarian), international influences (such as the European Union), and culture (legal and political).

The volume’s contributors are: Mihaela Serban, Kim Lane Scheppele, Kriszta Kovacs, Alexei Trochev, Peter Solomon, Olga Semukhina, Maria Popova, Vincent Post. Marina Zaloznaya, William Reisinger, Vicki Hesli Claypool, Kaja Gadowska, and Elena Bogdanova.

Über den Autor

Peter H. Solomon, Jr. is Professor Emeritus of Political Science, Law and Criminology at the University of Toronto and Member of its Centre for European, Russian and Eurasian Studies at the Munk School of Global Affairs, where he teaches on law and politics in Russia. His books include Soviet Criminal Justice under Stalin (Cambridge, 1996), and in Russian as Sovetskaia iustitsiia pri Staline (ROSSPEN, 1998 and 2008), Reforming Justice in Russia, 1864‑1996: Power, Culture, and the Limits of Legal Order (editor; Sharpe, 1997), and Courts and Transition in Russia: The Challenge of Judicial Reform (with Todd Foglesong, Westview, 2000). In the new millennium his research has focused on judicial reform in Russia and Ukraine, where he participates in reform projects (e.g. for the World Bank, OSCE, and the Canadian International Development Agency), as well as on criminal law, procedure, and justice in authoritarian and transitional states. His recent publications include: “Law and Courts in Authoritarian States, ” in the International Encyclopedia of Social and Behaivoral Sciences, 2nd edition (electronic); and ‘Post-Soviet Criminal Justice: The Persistence of Distorted Neo-inquisitorialism, ” Theoretical Criminology, 19:2 (2015). He is on the Board of Trustees of the Institute of Law and Public Policy (Moscow) and the editorial boards of the journals Demokratizatsiya, Russian Politics and Law, Statutes and Decisions, and Pravosudie.



Kaja Gadowska is Associate Professor at the Institute of Sociology, Jagiellonian University, Krakow. She is the author of Political and Economic Clientelism: A Systemic Analysis of Clientelistic Networks in the Restructuring of the Polish Coal Mining Industry After 1989 (WUJ, 2003), which received the First Klemens Szaniawski Prize and the First Stanis³aw Ossowski Prize for the best Ph D dissertation in the Social Sciences and Humanities. Her recent publications include National and International Anti-Corruption Efforts: The Case of Poland, in Fighting Corruption in Eastern Europe, ed. D. Schmidt-Pfister and H. Moroff (Routledge, 2012) and Dysfunctions of the Administration: The Civil Service in the Neo-Institutional Perspective (WUJ, 2015). Her research interests concentrate on dysfunctions of the public sphere, the impact of clientelist networks on the process of political and economic transformation in post-communist countries after 1989, as well as the problem of clientelism and corruption among Poland’s political and economic elites. She is a reviewer for the journals Studia Socjologiczne, Polish Sociological Review, Public Governance, and Ask: Research & Methods quarterly. She is a member of the Board of the Polish Sociological Association.