Your purchase has been completed. Your documents are now available to view.
Changing the currency will empty your shopping cart.
Everyday Law in Russia challenges the prevailing common wisdom that Russians cannot rely on their law and that Russian courts are hopelessly politicized and corrupt. While acknowledging the persistence of verdicts dictated by the Kremlin in politically charged cases, Kathryn Hendley explores how ordinary Russian citizens experience law.
Kathryn Hendley is William Voss-Bascom Professor of Law and Political Science at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. She is the author of Trying to Make Law Matter: Legal Reform and Labor Law in the Soviet Union and more than fifty scholarly articles addressing various aspects of how law works in contemporary Russia.
"In this truly excellent book, Kathyrn Hendley seeks to understand how the everyday legal system works in contemporary Russia. [...] In this valuable book, Hendley manages to construct a deeper analytical narrative that gives life to the presence of conflict resolution in Russia, without denying the reality of politicized justice and the various obstacles to judicial independence and efficiency."
Marina Kurkchiyan, Director of the Centre for Socio-Legal Studies, University of Oxford, coeditor of Law and Informal Practices: The Post-Communist Experience:
"Everyday Law in Russia is one of a very few attempts that have been made to study what law means and how it works for ordinary Russians. It is also by some margin the most comprehensive to date. Kathryn Hendley breaks away from the view that the law does not matter very much in Russia, that the legal system is dysfunctional, and that courts, judges, and lawyers exist principally to serve the political and economic interests of the elite. Hendley is no starry-eyed idealist; she just reports what she sees. In this work she invites us to join her in observing the ordinary people of Russia, most of whose lives are never touched by politics."
William E. Pomeranz, Deputy Director of the Kennan Institute, Wilson Center:
"In Everyday Law in Russia, Kathryn Hendley provides a comprehensive analysis of how local justice works in Russia. What emerges is a compelling story of Russian citizens as rational actors who fully understand the pluses and minuses of using the courts and who ultimately make their own personal and financial calculations when confronted with a civil wrong."
"This book challenges the prevailing common wisdom that Russians cannot rely on their law and that Russian courts are hopelessly politicized and corrupt. Drawing on extensive observational research in Russia's new justice of the peace courts as well as on focus groups and interviews, Hendley finds that any reluctance on the part of ordinary Russian citizens to use the courts is driven primarily by their fear of the time and cost—measured in both financial and emotional terms—of the judicial process."
Please login or register with De Gruyter to order this product.
