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8 E. Eur. Const. Rev. 81 (1999)
The New Hungarian Constitutional Court

handle is hein.journals/eeurcr8 and id is 301 raw text is: After Solvom, a retreat into formalism? The New Hungarian Constitutional Court Kim Lane Scheppele state under the rule of law is often described as one with a government of laws rather than of men. But even in such a state, particular men in power make a difference. Fot close to a decade, the Hungarian Consti- tutional Court has been perhaps the most powerful court of its kind in the world. It has now undergone a complete turnover ofjudges in the span of three years. Of the eleven judges on the Court in the fall of 1999, eight were elected between March 1998 and June 1999. The most senior judge, Andras Hollo, was elected only in November 1996. When the widely acknowledged intellectual leader of the Court, former president Laszlo Solyom, left the Court in the fall of 1998, Janos Nemeth, professor of civil procedure and chair of the National Election Comnmittee, was elected president. The first major decisions announced under the new president with his nearly new Court reveal that the new judges have views very different from those of the departing judges who shaped the Court in its initial nine years. It is still early, of course, and recent decisions are not definitive proof of a new attitude at the Court. Still, two important decisions in the opening months of 1999 indicate that the Court has taken a formalist turn, thereby increasing the govern- ment's and parliament's room for maneuver. From the Solyom to the Nemeth Court Most observers of the Constitutional Court recognize the enormous influence that former president Laszlo Solyom exercised over the tone and direction of the Court's decisions in its first nine years. Solyom was one of the five initial judges whose names had been agreed on at the 1989 national Roundtable Talks, and, as pres- ident, he wrote many of the Court's most sweeping decisions. (A volume of English translations of the Court's major decisions, edited by Solyom, will soon be published by the University of Michigan Press.) Offering far-reaching human-rights protection, the Solyom Court actively used its power to declare that parliament was acting unconstitutionally by omission, and struck down as unconstitutional roughly one out of three challenged laws in its early years. Solyom was known for advocating an invisible constitution and for talking about a common constitutional law of Europe, even though neither concept ever appeared in a majority opinion. Both concepts, however, authorized an expansive jurispru- dence in which little deference was accorded to parliament. Substantive answers to a number of policy questions were given by constitutional interpretation. Solyom was committed to the idea of an activist court that based its decisions on a coherent jurisprudence of principle that left relatively little room for politics. FALL 1999

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