Corruption and Commercial Courts in Russia: A reply to Kathryn Hendley and Peter Murrell (2014)

This is a response to Kathryn Hendley and Peter Murrell’s criticism of “The emergence of the rule of law in Russia”, Global Crime, Vol.14, No.1, 2013. In that paper, I challenge the main claim in Kathryn Hendley, Peter Murrell, and Randi Ryterman’s “Law, Relationships, and Private Enforcement: Transactional Strategies of Russian Enterprises” in Europe-Asia Studies, Vol.52, No.4, 2000. Hendley, Murrell, and Ryterman claim that economic actors in Russia relied on the law and commercial courts because the latter were relatively effective. I argue that, in the late 1990s, economic actors trusted the commercial courts because they believed that they could influence the judicial outcome with bribes. In their reply, Hendley and Murrell (2014) conclude that Gustafsson (2013) cannot teach us anything about Russia or about their own work. In this paper: I defend my assessment of the commercial courts and discuss the influence of widespread corruption in the Russia of the 1990s. I also argue that their favourable view of Russian law and legal institutions is based on a sample that is marked by a serious error. This means that their conclusion about my work is an opinion rather than a verified fact.