Quality of Commercial Court Judgments and Its Impact on Ensuring the Consistency of Case Law

Abstract

The article examines the criteria for assessing, guaranteeing, and ensuring the quality of commercial court judgments, as well as the impact of the quality of judicial decisions on maintaining judicial unity. A definition of the quality of a commercial court judgment is proposed, understood as an integral legal characteristic of the outcome of the administration of justice in commercial disputes, which reflects the degree to which the content, form, and reasoning of the judicial decision comply with the requirements of legality, substantiation, fairness, foreseeability, clarity, coherence, and consistency with uniform (settled) judicial practice; ensures the implementation of the rule of law; and guarantees the effective judicial protection of the rights and legitimate interests of participants in commercial legal relations. It is argued that the unity of judicial practice in commercial adjudication constitutes a state of consistency, coherence, and stability in the law-application activities of commercial courts at all levels, which ensures uniform interpretation and application of norms of commercial, civil, and procedural legislation in similar legal relations, promotes the foreseeability of judicial decisions, strengthens legal certainty in the sphere of commercial ties, and reinforces business actors’ trust in the judiciary. Its nature is twofold: procedural-legal, ensured by institutional mechanisms; and substantive-logical, manifested in the consistency of argumentation, the reasoning of judgments, and the logical coherence of legal conclusions, that is, in the quality of judicial acts as such. The boundaries between the notion of the quality of a judicial decision and such concepts as legality, substantiation, fairness, legitimacy, and effectiveness of a judicial decision are outlined. A system of derivative (secondary) micro-principles is proposed, specifying how the general foundations of commercial adjudication are operationalised within the structure and content of a commercial court judgment. The system of guarantees is elaborated, and the system of criteria for evaluating the quality of commercial court decisions is analysed, with proposals introduced for its improvement and supplementation under current conditions. In particular, the article proposes the introduction of a new criterion for evaluating the quality of a commercial court judgment — operational and economic resilience. This criterion should be understood as the capacity of a judicial decision to be enforceable, economically viable, resilient to external shocks (military, logistical, currency-related, inflationary, etc.), and not to generate new or excessive risks for the parties to economic circulation.