Judicial Specialization: Issues in Terminology
The author suggests an approach to the clarification of the relations among key concepts in judicial law such as judicial activity, judicial proceedings, organizational activity, justice - all of them in their relations with the contents of the concepts of specialization, competence, jurisdiction. The author considers the views of Russian researchers on the relations between the concepts of justice, legal proceedings and judicial activities, continuing to develop the position that justice is an integral part of the judicial activities. The author describes basic reasons for identifying types of legal proceedings and formation of certain types of court jurisdiction and the basic mechanisms of judicial specialization, identifies and describes two types of judicial specialization (functional specialization within the judiciary and institutional specialization in judicial system). The paper reveals the content of the institutional specialization which includes emergence of various jurisdictions (types of court jurisdiction), and the allocation of certain competencies within these jurisdictions for specialized courts. The author proves the necessity of distinguishing competency specialization (formation of specialized courts) on the specialization of jurisdictions and argues that specialized courts can exist only within the jurisdiction; jurisdiction, allocated according to certain criteria, always involve specialization, which removes the need to use the concept of specialized jurisdiction. On this basis, the author justifies the fact that in Russia specialized courts are the court for intellectual property rights relating to the arbitration courts and military courts subsystem relating to the courts of general jurisdiction. He considers the national doctrine has developed signs of judicial specialization, proposes to identify the features of judicial jurisdiction and specialized competence and the variants of the interpretation of the concept of justice in relation to the description of types of court jurisdiction in Russia. Developing changes in the Russian judicial system (formation of specialized courts, the abolition of the High Court of arbitration jurisdiction, the rejection of the creation of separate administrative jurisdiction and the juvenile justice system) are described in terms of the process of developing best practice and defining the limits of specialization and differentiation of judicial activity.