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Partlett, William --- "Post-Soviet constitution making" [2019] ELECD 2432; in Landau, David; Lerner, Hanna (eds), "Comparative Constitution Making" (Edward Elgar Publishing, 2019) 539

Book Title: Comparative Constitution Making

Editor(s): Landau, David; Lerner, Hanna

Publisher: Edward Elgar Publishing

Section: Chapter 25

Section Title: Post-Soviet constitution making

Author(s): Partlett, William

Number of pages: 28

Abstract/Description:

25 years after the collapse of the Soviet Union, the constitutional systems that emerged in the 15 post-Soviet republics remain under-researched and misunderstood. This chapter will begin to fill this gap by taking the first comprehensive look at constitution making in these 15 countries that span from Western Ukraine to the Russian Far East. Looking beyond formal text to the statutes and constitutional court decisions that implement this text, this Chapter will describe how many post-Soviet constitutional orders are driven or at least influenced by a normative belief in the value of centralism which stems from an exceptionalist tradition of ‘centralized state constitutionalism’. This finding yields important lessons regarding both the practice of post-Soviet constitutionalism as well as the incompleteness of formal constitutional text.