One of the salient features of Russian intellectual life after the Great Reforms (GR) was the estrangement of the intelligentsia from the state and its structures. A number of Russian intelligents felt that while Western European polities were progressing to a more liberal society, the Russian system remained mired in an arbitrary autocratic system that reflexively attacked modern developments. The GR period itself engendered this disillusionment as it for a brief period opened up hopes for greater political changes. GR institutions like the Zemstva did have a more open political order, but many of the reforms never went far enough to sate hopes for change. One of the exceptions to the half-measures of GR was the Russian court system.

The 1864 judiciary reform set up an independent judiciary, a jury system and Russian bar system that allowed for the professionalization of law. The first generation of Russia's nascent political party's leadership came from the Russian legal system. The courts themselves relatively open and were among the freest spaces in imperial society. The GR set up a jury system that allowed for male Russians from different walks of life to serve. In the distant provinces, this meant that peasants could be called upon to try their peers. Trials were also now public and the salaries of judges were increased to prevent corruption. In contrast to other GR institutions, the post-GR judiciary enjoyed a degree of unparalleled independence in an autocracy.

But being a more liberal institution in an autocracy is not exactly a high bar and Russian courts still had a number of illiberal components. Jury selection still favored literate upper-class individuals even if the statutes allowed for a wider juror composition. The law might have been an open profession, but there were still high barriers to access to education that made the law a very restricted profession. Nor did the open court system mean that Russian policing was also progressive. Secret police monitoring and arbitrary arrests were facets of the Russian system that were obvious to many contemporaries.

Pace Fetukyovich, the Russian courts were neither as free or as open as their analogues in the West. While the West's court system in this period too was mired with problems and illiberal practices it was a more open legal system compared to the Russian case. Moreover, there was a wide variation between legal standards and judicial systems within the Empire. Baltic, Polish, and Finnish legal systems operated differently than their analogues in Russia while Central Asian law tended to walk a confusing line between delegating to Islamic justice and strengthening a colonial order that privileged Great Russian settlers. But by the standards of other Great Reforms institutions, the Russian judicial system was a much more transparent and forward-looking institution than other aspects of the Russian state.

Sources

Clowes, Edith W., Samuel D. Kassow, and James L. West. Between Tsar and People: Educated Society and the Quest for Public Identity in Late Imperial Russia. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1991.

Lincoln, W. Bruce. The Great Reforms: Autocracy, Bureaucracy, and the Politics of Change in Imperial Russia. DeKalb, Ill: Northern Illinois University Press, 1990.

Weeks, Theodore R. Across the Revolutionary Divide: Russia and the USSR, 1861-1945. Chichester, West Sussex: Wiley-Blackwell, 2011.