Legal Change in Post-Communist States

Fighting Corruption in Eastern Europe, ed. D. Schmidt-Pfister and H. Moroff (Routledge, 2012) and Dysfunctions of the Administration: The Civil Service in the Neo-Institutional Perspective (WUJ, 2015). Her research interests concentrate on dysfunctions of the public sphere, the impact of clientelist networks on the process of political and economic transformation in post-communist countries after 1989, as well as the problem of clientelism and corruption among Poland's political and economic elites. She is a reviewer for the journals Studia Socjologiczne, Polish Sociological Review, Public Governance, and Ask: Research & Methods quarterly. She is a member of the Board of the Polish Sociological Association.

Eastern Europe. It is a 'must have' book for policy makers, for anyone interested in Eastern Europe, and for scholars working on democratic theories, comparative politics, legal cultures, constitutionalism, the rule of law, and legal institutions."-Marina Kurkchiyan, Professor, Centre for Socio-Legal Studies, University of Oxford "Once upon a time, 'post-communist' and 'transition' were semantically linked. The countries liberated from communist dictatorship were all assumed to be somewhere in transition to democracy, market economy, and the rule of law. Not everyone was optimistic about how far along the path particular countries would get, but that there was an identifiable path and that it had clear milestones and led in clearly identifiable directions was assumed almost without question. Those assumptions are long gone, and this valuable collection gives us many insights into why. Not only are these paths more jagged than we thought, not only can it be as easy to move backwards and forwards along them, but there are other paths-some unimagined, some unattractive-that have internal logics, rationales, constituencies, and resources, that close observation and intelligent reflection can uncover. This book is a trove of such observation and reflection. Drawing on meticulous research into institutional, cultural, and historical developments in Russia and eastern Central Europe, the articles in this book enrich our understanding of the openness and complexity of possibilities, some much harsher, others surprisingly less so, than originally envisaged. The book is a treasury of often counter-intuitive facts, detailed expert analyses, and closely-informed interpretation. It will inform area specialists, institutional designers, comparative legal, social and political theorists, and anyone with an interest in the largely unpredicted but increasingly unavoidable travails of constitutionalism and democracy-not just in the post-communist world, but in the modern world as a whole."-Martin Krygier, Gordon Samuels Professor of Law and Social Theory, University of New South Wales; Honorary Professor, RegNet, Australian National University "This volume offers important discussion of the difficult process of the establishment of liberal democracy and the rule of law almost from scratch. Its rich contents display profound insiders' knowledge and methodological expertise, and they are both original and informative. This is a book for everyone who wishes to understand how difficult transformative system change turns out to be in practice, and how easily the foundations of liberal constitutionalism, the rule of law and the functioning public sphere could be damaged, in post-communist countries and beyond. In fact, the trends found in Eastern, and East Central Europe can be observed in other parts of the world, even in developed democracies, and the authors' conclusions have broad explanatory relevance. The comprehensive and up-to-date studies are very valuable in the context of contemporary discussions on the liberal constitutionalism and rule of law."-Gra¿yna Sk¹pska, Professor, Institute of Sociology, Jagiellonian University, Cracow, Poland