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Access to Cassation – Historical and Modern Parallels. (September, 2009)

Valentin Braykov, Attorney-at-law
ACCESS TO CASSATION – HISTORICAL AND MODERN PARALLELS
Motto: In the law advance those who move on their knees and not those who walk on stilts.

Published in the the Bulgarian “BAR REVIEW”, issue 8-9/2009


INTRODUCTION

Every magistrate carries in his soul a lawyer’s baton. It is because their acts embody the aspiration to convince the ordinary citizen in the correctness and justice of their specific decision and of the applied law. They are the lawyers of power before the conscience of the man from the street and we are his lawyers before them. In this competition circle for his trust the ordinary man’s verdict on justice is the revelation which recognizes or rejects the existence of a state. He is the actual supreme jurisdiction, the real cassation. Through us he may ask the court for something but at the end the court and we together thirst for his approval.
The impulse for writing the following lines is my simple conviction that a sick state gives birth to sick law and a sick law does not give birth to justice. And because I wanted to write an indictment against mediocrity- there is no more place to step back.
In a professional aspect this research is a clumsy attempt to thank the bar for what it has created in my soul and heart and still helps me defend it.
I cannot pass over in silence my gratitude to our colleagues Werner Hiller from Vienna, Richard Askew from London and Scott Falk from New York who supplied me with invaluable legal books of IX and XX century on the researched topic. As well as to my friend Stoyan Stalev who let me use the library of his late father- the unforgettable prof. Jivko Stalev.
I owe most to my colleagues from the law office who by a discreet spiritual generosity granted me with the time to write these pages.
I ask for lenience and pardon in regard to some inevitable errors in the text to follow.
The full text of the article in Bulgarian is available here.