The court’s authority in the cases of the withdrawal of the applicant’s claim to recognise the normative legal act as inoperative: theoretical analysis and empirical study of the applicable legal regulation

Abstract

Systematic review of judicial practice (namely, cases of challenging normative legal acts of the Jewish Autonomous Region’s bodies of local self-government) shows, that courts are most likely to terminate proceedings when an applicant withdraws a claim. However, in the context of administrative court proceedings and in the cases when an applicant withdraws a claim to recognise a certain normative legal act as inoperative, both the court and the parties might be interested in comprehending the court’s authority from the point of view of legislature. In the present paper the author aims to find the most optimal legislative regulation in terms of the court’s authority in the aforementioned cases of claim withdrawal. The author is guided by following tasks: a) to analyse from a theoretical point of view the specifics of the procedure of withdrawing a claim to recognise a normative legal act as inoperative; b) to empirically analyse the reasoning behind the courts’ decisions to accept withdrawals of claims to recognise normative legal acts as inoperative; c) to make conclusions with regards to political and legal reasoning. The paper employs traditional methods in the field of jurisprudence, such as dogmatic method and interpretation of active legislation as well as relevant judicial rulings, also methods for finding the most fair and economically feasible solutions. The analysis of judicial rulings, together with the systematic interpretation of the norms of the Code of Administrative Judicial Procedure by the Supreme Court of the Russian Federation leads us to think, that the courts use judicial discretion in order to oppose those claim withdrawals that they believe should not be encouraged by the rule of law. The employment of judicial discretion as such does not present a problem - as opposed to it being employed intuitively, without due understanding of its inherent logic. As a result, the author comes to the conclusion that the courts should employ part 10, Article 213 of the CACP to prevent cases of conduct which may contradict either public interests and rights, or the interests of third parties protected by the law. The public interests may, in that case, violate law and order, morality, demands of a law or a legal act.