Post-Federalism and Judicial Change in Yugoslavia: The Rise of Ethno-Political Justice

Abstract

The Yugoslav case is a vivid illustration of just how contingent judicial authority is upon regime legitimation. As the struggle to maintain Yugoslav state unity entered a critical stage in 1990-91, the country's "constitutional judiciary," which had been a pillar of "socialist legality" within the Titoist and self-management legal order, proved helpless to prevent the collapse of the federal system. Moreover, the administration of justice was increasingly subject to political pressures from recently ascendant nationalist political parties which, although programmatically committed to the "rule-of-law" and also to the "depoliticization" of the judiciary, were, nevertheless, prepared to utilize the judicial sector and legal system for their own political goals. Communist political control over the courts had largely been eliminated, but Yugoslavia as a whole, and its individual regions, were still a long way from the creation of an indepen dent judiciary, let alone a post-communist rechtsstaat.