A judge makes a mistake — and for you that means a company in ruins, frozen accounts, three years of your life spent in court. For the judge, it means a reprimand behind closed doors, at best. More often, nothing at all: he calmly moves on to the next case as if nothing happened.
I see this asymmetry too often in my own practice to talk about it politely. So — no diplomatic hedging: why the system has spent decades protecting judicial misconduct, and what actually needs to change so that the person responsible for the mistake pays for it, not you and me.
The Rules of the Game Today: Absolute Immunity and a Shared Wallet
The system operates on a principle of absolute judicial immunity. Three facts make it particularly cynical.
The state pays, not the person at fault. A judge issues an unlawful, bizarre, or outright damaging ruling — and compensation to the injured party comes out of the treasury. That is, out of your taxes (Article 1070 of the Civil Code). The person actually responsible plays no part in this equation at all.
A recourse claim against the judge is almost always a legal myth. But not entirely — and this is where it gets interesting. Back in 2001, the Constitutional Court (Ruling No. 1-P of 25 January 2001) drew a distinction between two situations. If the unlawful act was a ruling on the merits of a case, a final criminal conviction is required — under Article 305 of the Criminal Code (knowingly issuing an unlawful judicial act) or for bribery. But if the harm was caused by a procedural violation — an unlawful seizure of property, delay, or another grave procedural breach — no conviction is formally required: it is enough for the judge’s fault to be established by “another court decision.”
It looks like a loophole. In practice, both provisions are dead — and, in my view, the reason isn’t so much the difficulty of proof as the system’s instinct for self-preservation. Finding one judge guilty under Article 305 opens the question of every similar case decided by that judge, or decided under the same pattern. That’s no longer one case — it’s thousands of potential reopenings, a wave of appeals, and a blow to public trust in the courts as a whole. It’s easier to look away once than to open a door you can’t close again. The numbers speak for themselves, and they’re current — I pulled the primary data from the Judicial Department of the Supreme Court of the Russian Federation (Form No. 10-a) for recent years. 2022: zero convictions under Article 305 across the whole of Russia. 2023: zero again. 2024: one person, nationwide, and even that was under Part 1, with no “grave consequences.” The first half of 2025: zero again. Three and a half years, the entire judicial system of the country, one conviction. The “other court decision” route works on the same avoidance logic without a conviction: there’s simply no one to issue it, when judges sitting behind the closed doors of qualification boards are the ones evaluating other judges — and any such finding automatically calls their colleagues’ rulings in similar cases into question. The possibility exists in both provisions. The mechanism exists in neither.
Gross negligence carries zero financial liability. The worst a judge risks for ruined lives is a reprimand behind the closed doors of a qualification board.
Here’s what that looks like in practice, not in the text of the law:
“Judicial arithmetic” and a lost asset. A judge orders a business owner to pay off a debt worth millions, having “overlooked” the original payment receipts proving it was already settled in full. An appellate or cassation court later overturns the ruling — but by then the company’s accounts have been frozen, its contracts have fallen through, and it has gone bankrupt. The owner sues the treasury for damages and receives a payout a couple of years later. The judge? Carries on hearing cases and “overlooks” documents in the next one — there’s no way to bring a recourse claim against him without a conviction under Article 305, and such a conviction is a rare exception among rare exceptions.
Formalism against the individual. A judge leaves a complaint without action and then returns it, having miscounted the dates and wrongly concluded the deadline had passed. While the person spends months proving to a higher court that the judge simply can’t count days on a calendar, the real deadlines for protecting their rights burn away — reinstatement at work, challenging a transaction. This is formally exactly the kind of case where no conviction is needed and “another court decision” would suffice. In practice, such a decision naming a specific judge is never issued: the higher court overturns the act and stops there, the question of personal fault is never even raised. The result: a life derailed, an obvious error, and zero accountability.
And here’s the irony in all of this. Notaries are required by law to carry liability insurance (Article 18 of the Fundamentals of Notary Legislation). Article 19 of Law No. 63-FZ says attorneys should too — but the duty to comply with it (Article 7, Part 1, Subparagraph 6 of the same law) has been suspended since 2007, by Law No. 320-FZ, pending a separate law on how such insurance should work — a law that has never materialized: nineteen years running, it’s effectively voluntary. Lawyers without bar status have no regulation at all — no license, no insurance requirement. A patchwork picture, I’ll grant you. But even within it, everyone carries some form of accountability to their client — reputational, contractual, and for some, insurance too. A judge is shielded from all of it entirely. And not so much by the letter of the law as by the absence of anyone willing to enforce it.
What It Could Look Like: A Flexible Model of Personal Accountability
No one is proposing an extreme — “make a mistake, hand over your apartment.” That would simply paralyze the courts with fear of ruling on anything complicated at all.
But a reasonable model is needed, and it should rest on three principles.
Judicial liability insurance. Mandatory contributions into a dedicated fund. When an act is found to be manifestly unlawful, the base damages are covered by insurance — not by an abstract taxpayer.
A tiered system of recourse — instead of one blanket immunity for every situation:
- a good-faith error (differing interpretations of open-textured legal concepts) — immunity and appeal continue to apply, as now;
- gross negligence (a direct disregard of the plain text of the law, settled Supreme Court practice, or basic procedural rights) — the state pays the injured party, but files a recourse claim against the judge capped at their annual income; this is exactly where the existing but dormant “other court decision” provision finally needs to start working;
- intent or corruption — full financial liability and a criminal sentence, as already provided under Article 305.
An independent filter. “Gross negligence” shouldn’t be a finding made by a qualification board in its current form, but by an independent body that includes mandatory representation from the bar and legal academia. Otherwise judges will keep evaluating judges — and we already know how that ends.
What We’d Gain From This
Formalism would disappear on its own. Once a judge knows that a “because I said so” ruling or a superficial reading of the case file will cost them out of their own pocket, the motivation to actually dig into the details shows up instantly.
Rights would be balanced by privilege. High status, immunity, and generous lifetime provisions for judges should be matched by an equal measure of personal accountability.
Trust in the courts would start to recover. Society needs to see that the robe isn’t a license for impunity.
What This Actually Requires
Amendments to the Law on the Status of Judges and the Civil Code — above all, clarifying who establishes an “other court decision” on a judge’s fault for a procedural failure, and how.
Clear statutory criteria for “gross negligence” — a legislative line between the right to hold one’s own legal position and outright procedural sabotage.
A genuine reform of the qualification boards — transparency at the Supreme and regional boards that rules out closing ranks.
And most importantly — a procedure that doesn’t unleash a wave of unrelated reopenings. A separate process for establishing one judge’s personal fault — whether under Article 305 or through an “other court decision” — without an automatic reopening of every similar act in unrelated cases. As long as finding one judge guilty threatens the system with thousands of reopenings, it will never make that finding. That, not any lack of courage among individual judges, is the real reason the system stays silent.
This piece is about the money — who pays for the mistake. For how the block on criminal prosecution actually works at the level of the qualification boards, see Why Judges Are Almost Never Criminally Prosecuted. And for how the same “we don’t turn on our own” logic plays out through the mechanism that brings retired judges back to the bench — with double payments from the budget, courtesy of the same principle of immunity — see Article 7.1 on Judges Returning From Retirement.
Every ruling carries a specific signature. As long as that signature costs its author nothing in the worst-case outcome, we’ll keep paying for other people’s mistakes. Enough signing other people’s checks.