engleski

Profession of Judges in Contemporary Croatia, Serbia, and Bosnia and Herzegovina: a Sociological Analysis

As bearers of functions of mediation and authoritative adjudication, and as one of the most important agents of social stability, namely in modern societes furnished with complex legal landscapes, judges are at the centrefold of the sociology of legal professions. In socio-legal purview, judges are understood as a proto- profession or one of the first legal professions to form through the process of functional differentiation and specialisation. Nowadays, judges are perceived as actors holding immense degree of institutional power that is utilised either to uphold the rule of law architecture that pivots modern democratic societies or to act as agents of social change in transitional democratic societies such as those in the Western Balkans Region. But who are our judges? What is their social status and how do they perceive their own professional status and status of their fellow lawyers? How do they fare in the public trust perception and what is their own perception in that regard? What do they consider to be strengths, weaknesses and challenges in their respective judicial systems, ever-subjected to the process of reforms aimed to reach the higher standards? Authors seek to answer these and similar questions, and provide a sociological, namely socio-legal, account of judges as a legal profession by utilising the data-set produced in a comparative research project titled „Lawyers and Legal Profession in Contemporary Croatia, Serbia, and Bosnia and Herzegovina“ during 2018. This research represents one of the very rare attempts to gaze judges sociologically and continue the research practice built upon the foundations laid by the seminal work of Uglješa Zvekić's „Profesija sudija: sociološka analiza“ (1985).

judges, legal profession, judiciary, (post)transition, (self)perception, comparative approach

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