Despite being an essential building block to economic and political transitions, law is often left out of the story. In Legal Change in Post-Communist States, law takes center stage. The authors seek to explain the ebb and flow in the role of law and legal institutions in countries emerging from Soviet-style communism. Among the institutions studied are the police, the courts, the civil service, and the law itself. The analysis focuses more on law in action than on law in the books, though the authors are careful to situate themselves in the appropriate statutory setting. Yet the writing is not mired in legalese; it ought to be accessible to all interested readers.

One of the most important questions tackled is how and why citizens mobilize the law. In the first chapter, Mihaela Şerban tracks the use of courts, both domestic and supranational, in the countries of central and eastern Europe. She argues for the emergence of a specific variant of adversarial legal culture in which litigation has grown more common; she effectively marshals caseload data to support her thesis. In her opinion, the remaking of the institutional environment to make legal entities more accessible combined with a “massive outpouring of resources from external sources, both the US and the EU” (27) have given rise to greater opportunities for citizens to use the law, and that they have taken advantage of them. In a later chapter, Elena Bogdanova picks up on this theme to track changes in citizens’ ability to hold officials accountable in Soviet and post-Soviet Russia. She documents how the changes in constitutional and statutory language affected the potential for accountability. At the same time, she reminds the reader of the existence of multiple informal accountability mechanisms. Like Şerban, Bogdanova makes superb use of the available data to document the trends.

At the outset of the transition from communism, constitutional courts were heralded as a critical piece of the puzzle thanks to their unprecedented power of judicial review. For a time, their promise was realized. With the return to authoritarianism, their relevance has dimmed. Kriszta Kovács and Kim Lane Scheppele analyze the devolution of these tribunals in Hungary and Poland. They do a superb job of tracking what happened in each country, never losing sight of the larger political context. They argue that both courts were eventually neutralized as a check on those in power, with the officials of the European Union unwilling or unable to stand up to political leaders. They conclude that “[j]udicial independence, once quite strong in both Poland and Hungary, is now a thing of the past” (57). In their chapter, Peter H. Solomon Jr. and Alexei Trochev focus on the Russian Constitutional Court. While conceding that this court has been “a vocal supporter of [the] Kremlin's agenda” (116), they argue that the court has recast itself as a pragmatic political actor, allowing it to “[expand] judicial activism” (122) in cases without political resonance. Like other authors in this volume, they include multiple tables with caseload data that support their contentions.

The question of accountability is explored through the lens of corruption in two chapters. Marina Zaloznaya, William M. Reisinger, and Vicki Hesli Claypool challenge a foundational belief that civil society engagement is an essential prerequisite for success of anti-corruption programs. Through case studies in Russia and Ukraine, grounded in semi-structured interviews, they conclude that “a dysfunctional relationship between governmental and non-governmental actors may impede, rather than promote, efforts to eradicate corruption” (222). This intriguing finding deserves further investigation. Maria Popova and Vincent Post take a different tack. They are interested in the propensity of post-communist governments to investigate and prosecute official wrongdoing and, to that end, have constructed the East European Corruption Prosecution database that “systematically tracks the prosecution of cabinet ministers on corruption charges” (185). Their chapter explores the period from 2000 to 2012. They test a series of hypotheses through regression analyses in an effort to explain why some countries are more aggressive than others. This database is an important contribution and will surely spur further research.

The quality of the chapters in this edited volume is consistently high. The authors ask important questions covering many countries and use a variety of methods in their analysis. The book deserves to be read by all serious students of post-communist transitions.