engleski

Does “internal crisis” of the judicial system leads to an ‘internal crisis’ of the legal profession? Cases of Croatia and Serbia.

Although social contexts in Serbia and Croatia are to a certain extent different, democratic transition in both societies were marked by corruption, nepotism, “tycoonization” and political authoritarianism. These phenomena led to malfunction of important social institutions and low trust of citizens in them. We present results from survey conducted on the sample of legal professionals in 2018. Results show that legal professionals don’t have trust in key social institutions ; (dis)trust in judicial system is correlated to (dis)satisfaction with general situation in the judiciary and to (dis)satisfaction with the functioning of its important institutional parts. Combining macro and micro-institutional approach to trust in institutions, we argue that the obtained results indicate existence of “internal crisis”. However, we also argue that this “internal crisis” needs to be interpreted as the “crisis of the institutions” and not the “crisis of the profession”, as our results show the professionals have maintained their professional values.

legal profession ; trust ; professional ethics ; judiciary ; Croatia ; Serbia

nije evidentirano