Constitutional justice in Southeast Europe

Constitutional courts play potentially significant roles in the transformation of legal orders in transition states. This collection offers a comparative analysis of constitutional justice in Southeast Europe and its place in the common European legal space. The comparison brings together longer transition experiences like Hungary’s with rare insights into the later wave of constitutional transformation in little-studied jurisdictions like Kosovo, Serbia and Albania. Thematically it focuses on the relationship of constitutional courts to ordinary judiciaries and to the European Court of Human Rights. How are the interactions between these judicial bodies regulated? Do they cooperate or conflict in practice? And what is the resulting impact of the constitution and of the ECHR in legal reality? Through this lens, the authors highlight patterns and processes of constitutionalization and Europeanization and shed light on wider trends in the evolution of constitutional justice and the rule of law. Constitutional courts emerge as interfaces between various layers of domestic and international law and as building blocks in the European multi-level architecture of human rights protection.