Criterion of non-compliance with a judicial act: a special limit for reviewing judicial acts based on newly discovered and new circumstances, or a temporary tool in the process of manually balancing the principle of legal certainty?

The subject of this article is an analysis of the criterion of non-execution (not fulfilled or partially fulfilled) as a special limit on the review of judicial acts. The author describes the history of the emergence and development of the criterion of non-fulfillment in the practice of the Constitutional Court of the Russian Federation and in legislation, provides critiques of the criterion found in literature, its transformation into a criterion for the reviewing a judicial act, and also raises questions about the future of the criterion of non-fulfillment in the system of judicial act review given its modernization. Additionally, based on the characteristic of the specificity of the criterion of non-fulfillment, the author puts forward a hypothesis about the special legal nature of a number of new circumstances (recognition of a norm/its interpretation as unconstitutional, determination or change of the practice of norm application, cancellation of a regulatory act in the course of administrative norm control). The research employs methods such as historical, systemic, axiological, formal-legal, functional, sociological methods, as well as analysis, synthesis, and modeling. The author concludes that despite the fact that the criterion of non-fulfillment is currently formally almost excluded from legal practice, fully abandoning it is premature. In the systematization of legislation on the review of judicial acts, this criterion may be taken into account (with appropriate refinement). The author hypothesizes that the legal nature of the circumstances to which the criterion of non-fulfillment may be applied falls outside the concept of new circumstances and indicates the need to distinguish them into a separate group of grounds for reviewing judicial acts. Considering that in legal reality there are still several situations to which the review mechanisms for newly discovered and new circumstances apply because procedural legislation lacks other tools for a court to review its own act, it is proposed to modernize the content of procedural codes in this part. The results of the work can be used for the development of procedural legislation and the formation of a more coherent view of the system for reviewing judicial acts (extra-institutional and institutional stages), as well as in the educational process when studying relevant disciplines.

newly discovered circumstances, new circumstances, judicial review, principle of legal certainty, extraordinary appeal, miscarriage of justice, annulment of a judicial act, extra-institutional review, institutional review, criterion of non-execution