Gathering and Examination of Evidence in Russian and American Constitutional Litigation

This article attempts to critically assess the gathering and examination of evidence in Russian and American constitutional litigation. With references to case law of the Russian Constitutional Court and the United States Supreme Court, the author demonstrates that the properties of judicial review of legislation have significantly shaped the basic elements of constitutional fact-finding. The general idea of the article is that owing to the practice of «in-house» re-search conducted by the Russian Constitutional Court, constitutional justice in Russia tends to be inquisitorial, whereas judicial review of legislative actions exercised by American trial courts basically complies with the adversarial principle. At the same time when it comes to constitutional litigation in federal appellate courts and the United States Supreme Court, one can observe a clear deviation from the adversarial principle and notice investigative traits that appear to be at odds with the American concept of justice. Also in both countries there exists a similar negative trend associated with constitutional reasoning based on evidence that was not tested by parties in the course of constitutional proceedings.