Journal of the Charles University Law Faculty
Tereza Papoušková, Jan Papoušek
Author’s affiliation:
Faculty of Law, Masaryk University Brno
Lawyers before the Constitutional Court of the Czech Republic: Does Experience Make Them More Successful
Jurisprudence 2/2017 Section: Articles Page: 12-24
Keywords: Constitutional Court of the Czech Republic, lawyers, success rate of lawyers, experience of lawyers, influence of experience on chances of success, quantitative analysis
Abstract: In the Czech Republic, it is rather uncommon that apex courts are appealed to only by lawyers who specialize in the relevant type of procedure and who take over, with the consent of their client, the case from their less experienced colleagues. However, it is a standard elsewhere. Would such a practice be justifiable also in the context of proceedings before the Constitutional Court of the Czech Republic? Are the experienced lawyers more likely to win before the Court? The authors answer this question in the affirmative. They do so based on an analysis of data on 40,489 final rulings of the Court to which they were able to assign to a concrete lawyer. Thus, they contribute to a broader scientific debate regarding the relation between a lawyer’s experience and their chances of success in court. Beyond testing existing hypotheses, the authors also make public some statistics on the behaviour of lawyers before the Court that have never been published before.
