Judicial Overstay

• Department of Law

This event features a discussion with David Kosař (Masaryk University & EUI) on his paper written with Patrick Leisure (Masaryk University) on judicial overstay.

Synopsis

While several preeminent comparative law scholars have recently examined the phenomenon of executive overstay, there is little discussion about the equally troublesome phenomenon of judicial overstay – which broadly refers to when a judge sits on the bench for longer than original conditions would have allowed. This article is the first to systematically describe, conceptualize, and assess the phenomenon of judicial overstay in comparative perspective. Its aim is three-fold. First, we illustrate that judicial overstay occurs in common law as well as civil law countries all around the world and both in consolidated democracies and transitioning or hybrid regimes. Second, we show that the maximum term in the judicial branch is determined by the rules and conventions concerning term limits, age limits, and life limits, and that judicial overstay is relevant for all of those three limits. Thirdly, we argue that judicial overstay can serve both noble and ignoble purposes, and introduce an analytical toolkit for how to evaluate judicial overstay across time and space. To this end, we introduce six spectrums along which judicial overstay may occur, with corresponding policy implications.

Speaker

David Kosař (M.A. (Brno), LL.M. (CEU), J.S.D. (NYU)) is Professor of Constitutional Law and Director of the Judicial Studies Institute at Masaryk University in Brno. His current project (ERC Consolidator Grant) studies informal judicial institutions ( INFINITY – Informal Judicial Institutions: Invisible Determinants of Democratic Decay"). His previous project (ERC Starting Grant) studied the effects of judicial self-governance (JUDI-ARCH, 2016-2021). He authored Perils of Judicial Self-Government in Transitional Societies (CUP, 2016), which won the International Academy of Comparative Law Canada Prize for the best monograph in comparative law published in the years 2014-2017, co-authored Domestic Judicial Treatment of European Court of Human Rights Case Law: Beyond Compliance (Routledge, 2020) and The Constitution of Czechia (Hart, 2021).