A Constitutional Court in Transition: Making Sense of Constitutional Adjudication in Post-authoritarian Serbia

The paper explains the role of the Serbian constitutional court during the democratic transition on two levels: normatively, it assesses the performance of the court in securing liberal-democratic values; and descriptively, it accounts for the factors that affected its performance. In contrast to the dominant narrative about the positive impact of constitutional courts on democratic transition, the paper argues that the role of the Serbian constitutional court in protecting liberal-democratic values was rather modest. The paper identifies a number of factors that negatively affected the performance of the court as it struggled to build the authority in a legally and politically unstable environment.