Ring the Bell. Judiciaries as Anti-Autocratization Radar Systems
Katarína Šipulová is the Director of the multidisciplinary Judicial Studies Institute (JUSTIN) at Masaryk University (Brno, Czech Republic). She has earned her PhD in European Studies at the Faculty of Social Studies, Masaryk University (2017), and the MSt title in Socio-Legal Research at the University of Oxford. Her main area of interest rests with courts. She has extensively studied judicial independence, governance of courts, the role of courts and judges in transitional justice and democratization processes (with particular focus on Central and Eastern European regimes). Katarína worked as Head of the International Department of the Czech Supreme Court. She has been an active member of several research projects dealing with human rights as well as international law and its impact on domestic jurisprudence. She currently participates in the ERC CoG research project INFINITY: Informal Judicial Institutions and Democratic Decay. She is a member of the Oxford Global Society, the Czech government’s Committee for Fundamental Rights and Prevention of Discrimination, and the ECPR Law and Courts Steering Committee. She has recently published in Law&Policy, HJRL, I-CON, EuConst and co-edited a special issue for GLJ “Informal Institutions: The Invisible Determinants of Democratic Decay” (2023).
Ring the Bell. Judiciaries as Anti-Autocratization Radar Systems
What role do judges play in protection of principles of constitutional democracy and rule of law? Scholarship often portrays courts as guardians of democracy. But is that how judges understand their role? Building on a sociological approach, this project argues that judges in different political and cultural settings internalise meta-concepts like democracy, rule of law and judicial independence differently. This then reflects on how they see and fulfil their role within political system. In this sense, the project presents a prologue to a wider research on motivations of judges to resist or defer to the democratic decay. It argues that judicial resistance is a complex phenomenon that depends on a variety of factors, which can however be organised in three logical steps. In order to resist, judges first need to recognise the attack and its risks, weigh these risks against potential personal gains, decide how to act, and finally communicate the risks to the public and their immediate allies. The project zooms in on the first stage and using the plausibility study of England and Slovakia discusses the process in which judges internalise their roles in democracy and build awareness of potential challenges and measures they can use to deter them.
