Judicial Attitudes and Their Influence on the Panel Decision-making of the Constitutional Court of the Czech Republic
Abstract
The chapter deals with decision-making on constitutional complaints and focuses on the differences between the approaches of individual judges of rapporteurs. In this context, it first discusses the possibility of applying the attitudinal model of judicial decision-making to this area of decision-making and concludes that it is not appropriate to proceed from the traditional form of attitudinal model, which identifies judges' attitudes to their position on the right-left ideological scale.
The chapter also provides a statistical analysis of decisions on constitutional complaints issued in the period from 1 January 2015 to 30 June 2019, which shows that the known differences between the success rate before different judges rapporteurs are even more pronounced when focusing on selected case characteristics. The judges are thus influenced by the following case characteristic: does the case concern a civil or criminal area? Was the complaint issued by natural or legal person? Is the violation of the right to own property, or social and cultural rights alleged? In the follow-up analysis of the content of decisions issued in the period from 1 January 2018 to 31 July 2019, the chapter shows that judges differ in their willingness to deviate from the current legal status quo defined by the text of legislation and the current case law.