Judicial ReEngineering

exam is both written and oral, but the main test is oral. The qualifications commission is
composed of seven advocates, two judges, two representatives of the regional legislature, and
two representatives of the Ministry of Justice.
In 1988 there were 25,000 lawyers, [19] and in 2002 there were 47,000 defense lawyers in all of
Russia.
Jurors
A juror must be 25 years old, legally competent, and without a criminal record.
Regulation of Russian Law
The judiciary is primarily regulated by the Constitution of Russia, the Code of Criminal
Procedure, and the 1996 Federal Constitutional Law on the Judicial System of the Russian
Federation. The Constitution states that the judicial branch is independent of the legislative and
executive branches, but there have been serious violations of the accepted separation of powers
doctrine.
There is no usage of precedent, as used in common law legal systems. As such, the law on appeal
may depend on the composition of the chamber deciding the appeal. A chamber normally
consists of 3 judges, out of the dozens of judges within the court (19 in the Constitutional Court,
115 in the Supreme Court). Without the legal principle of stare decisis, for each case a chamber
may come to a different, even contradictory, conclusion, even compared to chambers within the
same session. If they come to relatively consistent decisions, those in civil law legal systems call
this jurisprudence constante.
Criminal Procedure
Everyone has the right of legal assistance. The accused have the right to a defense lawyer from
the time they are detained, put in custody, charged, or declared a suspect. According to the 2001
Code of Criminal Procedure, defense lawyers can participate in investigations with the consent
of the prosecutor, meet privately with a client, collect evidence independently of the prosecutor,
identify defense witnesses, present expert witnesses, be present for all court procedures, access to
the prosecutions evidence after the investigation, and to file appeals regarding court procedures.
For serious and specific crimes, the accused have the option of a jury trial consisting of 12
jurors. [8] The crimes that may be tried by a jury are murder, kidnapping, rape with aggravating
circumstances, child trafficking, gangsterism, large-scale bribery, treason, terrorism, public calls
for violent change in the constitutional system or for the seizure of power, and select other
crimes against the state. The Constitution of Russia stipulates that, until the abolition of the death
penalty, all defendants in a case that may result in a death sentence are entitled to a jury trial.
Jurors are selected by the prosecution and defense from a list of 30-40 eligible candidates. They
are similar to common law juries, and unlike lay judges, in that they sit separately from the
judges and decide questions of fact alone while the judge determines questions of law. They
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