More than a year ago, at the Institute for Law and Public Policy, we discussed how and with what we can "celebrate" the approaching anniversary of the Constitutional Court – October 30, 2021 marks exactly 30 years from the date of election of its first composition of 13 judges. It was definitely impossible to miss such a date, because three decades is just the milestone that allows you to look back and draw the first conclusions. For us, this task was especially important.

However, it is difficult to come up with something new when constitutional law is the core of your activity, and the values of constitutionalism are the permanent vector of daily work. We published practical manuals, compiled instructions on how to file a complaint with the Constitutional Court, and most recently received from the printing house a fundamental collective monograph on the history of the Constitutional Court.

This time we wanted to make something easy, accessible and understandable to everyone (and even those who are far from jurisprudence) - material that, both in individual chapters and in general, will show the importance, need and value of such a body as the Constitutional Court, how it has changed and what it has brought to the life of ordinary Russians. And it is hardly possible to find a more revealing format than an illustration through simple cases - after all, nothing characterizes a phenomenon as much as a presentation in dynamics, through individual events that had tangible consequences at one time.

"We need to create a list of the most important decisions of the Constitutional Court over the years of its work," we thought.

From the very moment we decided on the topic, the most difficult, as it turned out later, work began - to select those very 30 decisions that could show all the variety and breadth of the jurisprudence of the Constitutional Court, and at the same time demonstrate how the Court changed from year to year.

So what was the main difficulty? It is precisely in the question of where to agree on which of the thousands of decisions of the Constitutional Court had the greatest impact on law enforcement and lawmaking. Those which formed the attitude to the law.

We do not pretend to assert that the list that came out as a result is objective. Sometimes you can also notice a share of interest in it - we could not help but include in it those cases, decisions on which were made with the direct participation of the Institute and which we sincerely consider to be breakthrough. But what can we say for sure - we collected it based on the opinions of completely different lawyers - from different industries, different degrees of publicity, different generations, different schools of thought. What our authors eventually described is, in a good sense, a "hodgepodge" brewed by those whose opinion we fully trust.

Each of the 30 cases consists of three sections - a description of the plot, the essence of the decision of the Constitutional Court and its consequences. We tried to present our list of cases as objectively as possible, but at the same time simply complex things. The authors of this project are not lawyers, but professional journalists whose job it is to gather opinions and present facts. All solutions are ordered chronologically. This seems to be the only way to rank our list without giving priority to any of the decisions.

We do not offer conclusions, we do not want to operate with the categories "good" or "bad" and we do not draw up a conclusion for the reader. Everyone will draw their own conclusions.

The Institute would like to thank Olga Kryazhkova, a specialist in constitutional law, for her help in creating this project. She, like many other experts of various legal fields, helped us compile a list of those decisions, each of which had an impact on law enforcement practice in its own way.

Thanks to Pavel Blokhin, who reviewed this text, making comments and suggestions to the original version, and also adding topics for future digests.

And immeasurable gratitude to the main critic Tamara Morshchakova - it is to her that we owe not only corrections and comments, but also hour-long conversations about the history and context of some decisions, as well as the content of everything that the reader will find in this report.

Citation:
Constitutionalism in dynamics: the history of the modern Constitutional Court of the Russian Federation through the prism of its key decisions. – Moscow: Institute for Law and Public Policy. 2023. URL: https://ilpp.ru/en/RCC-30-years-30-desicions/

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