Role of supreme courts in ensuring uniform judicial practice: trends in the post-Soviet space

Due to various factors, states choose different approaches to ensuring uniform judicial practice, which is a necessary component of legal certainty. While in the common law countries judicial precedent has been a trusted tool for this task, in socialist countries lower courts would follow the guiding clarifications of the top judicial bodies. Following the collapse of the USSR, three separate trends took shape in the 1990s – 2000s: statutory establishment and detailed description of the guiding (and even obligatory) role of clarifications made on relevant issues by the plenary body of the apex court, decrease of importance of such clarifications to a role of simple recommendations and complete abolishment of such an instrument.

Having studied the legislative changes in post-Soviet countries, we may conclude that due to the inevitable role of the apex court as a beacon of judicial practice, abandoning clarifications on issues of judicial practice increases the significance of that court’s decisions in individual cases, which effectively introduces elements of stare decisis into a country’s legal system.