Review

The administration of justice based on the rule of law, safeguards for everyone’s right to a fair trial are vital to society, especially in modern times, when people are vulnerable to any injustice and much efforts should be fostered to ensure courts’ impartiality.

Trust in the entire judicial system and to each judge is separately formed, first, internally. Every person should feel, both mentally and in heart, that justice has taken place, it has indeed been dispensed, and the decision taken not in favour of a person, even one that was abolished by higher judicial authorities, was not arbitrary, unjust, unlawful.

Justice is one of the main functions of the state judiciary, a country with the rule of law in general, and requires efficient safeguards, especially by means of staffing. This is due to the fact, that the quality of justice is determined by the attitude of judges to dispensing of justice.

From this perspective, it is the discretion of judges that becomes a mean that can overcome the legal and factual uncertainty, safeguarding a justified and legitimate decision.

In contemporary period, much attention is paid to judicial discretion. However, despite the high scientific and practical value of research works on issues regarding discretion, they are predominantly sectoral in nature and relate to judicial discretion in criminal proceedings. Whilst the complex study of the concept of judicial discretion in making decisions, its features, types, stages, limits and limits of the permissible freedom of a judge, has not been conducted yet.

The purpose of this article is to determine the essence of judicial discretion through the spectacle of peculiarities of legal status of a judge. Since judges are empowered with competences, which may be, extrinsically, perceived as unlimited, it is necessary to carry out a research of judicial discretion in light of legal status of a judge in order to provide a comparison of discretion with the principle of legality.

The concept of judicial discretion and its features, which are provided in scientific works, is explored in this research.

The limits of the use of judicial discretion are outlined and certain limits are found when judicial discretion turns into judicial arbitrariness.

It is becoming a challenging task to delineate unlawful judicial decisions adopted as a result of judicial mistake, which is not connected with culpability, and judicial negligence, when the result of the administration of justice is in strong dependence on judicial discretion.

Considering the revealed problem, a particular attention is devoted to the disclosure of the content of a judicial error and its types. An estimation of expediency of an unconditional assignment of judicial error to culpable unlawful judicial conduct is provided. The author also analyses the interconnectedness of judicial arbitrariness and an unlawful judicial error.

Inferences are made on the inevitability of liability for a judicial error, which is not innocent.

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