2007 Edward S. Corwin Award
Awarded for the best dissertation completed in the field of public law.
Award Committee: Matthew C. McCubbins, University of California, San Diego, Chair; Nancy S. Mandel, Institute of International Trade Law; Isaac Unah, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill
Recipient: Maria Dimitrova Popova, McGill University
Dissertation: "Judicial Independence and Political Competition: Electoral and Defamation Disputes in Russia and Ukraine”
Dissertation Chair: Timothy Colton, Harvard University
Citation: The committee received many outstanding nominations this year. Several of those nominated applied advanced statistical analyses to novel data sets on judicial decisions. Several other nominations explored classic questions regarding judicial independence, the rule of law and a separation of powers. Many of the nominees studied the issues of the rule of law, justice and judicial independence in countries other than the United States, implicitly extending the legacy of Edward S. Corwin to countries outside the Anglo American legal tradition.
In “Judicial Independence and Political Competition: Electoral and Defamation Disputes in Russia and Ukraine,” Maria Dimitrova Popova shows that judicial independence and the rule of law is a product of political necessity not institutional design. In particular, Popova shows that in unconsolidated democracies, political competition actually hinders judicial independence. She shows that weak incumbents derive greater benefit from dependent courts and are thus more likely to politicize the judiciary than are strong incumbents. Dr. Popova tests this proposition by examining trial win-rates, at various trial levels, of plaintiffs according to their political affiliations. She uses her multi-stage win-rates to test her proposition in two similar cases, Russia and the Ukraine. She looks across different plaintiff groups in both countries sorted by institutional and party affiliation and shows that these win-rates, for a class of cases, are more responsive to the preferences of incumbent politicians in the Ukraine than in Russia. The central irony of Dr. Popova finding is that corruption in an unconsolidated democracy can actually lead to the conditions for judicial independence, questioning the very basic relationship, so often assumed, between judicial independence and the rule of law.
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