Peter Solomon

Peter H. Solomon, Jr. is Emeritus Professor of Political Science, Law and Criminology at the University of Toronto and affiliated faculty of the Centre for European, Russian and Eurasian Studies at the Munk School of Global Affairs and Public Policy. 

His books include Soviet Criminal Justice under Stalin (Cambridge, 1996), and in Russian as Sovetskaia iustitsiia pri Staline in 1998 and 2008 by ROSSPEN), Reforming Justice in Russia, 18641996: Power, Culture, and the Limits of Legal Order (editor; Sharpe, 1997), and Courts and Transition in Russia: The Challenge of Judicial Reform (with Todd Foglesong, Westview, 2000).] In the new millennium his research has focused on judicial reform in Russia and Ukraine, where he has participated in reform projects (for the World Bank, OSCE, and the Canadian International Development Agency), as well as on criminal law, procedure, and justice in authoritarian and transitional states. 

His recent publications include: “Law and Courts in Authoritarian States,” in the International Encyclopedia of Social and Behavioral Sciences, 2^nd edition (electronic); and ‘Post-Soviet Criminal Justice: The Persistence of Distorted Neo-inquisitorialism,” Theoretical Criminology, 19:2 (2015); “Applied Sovietology: Refugee Claims from the Post-Soviet Space” The Postcommunist World in the Twenty-First Century:  How the Past Informs the Present , edited by Linda Cook and Barbara Chotiner (Lexington Books, 2022), chapter 10; and The Judicial System of Russia, with Kathryn Hendley (Oxford University Press, 2023).

He is on the Board of Trustees of the Institute of Law and Public Policy (Moscow) and the editorial boards of four journals and a former director of the Centre for Russian and East European Studies. He has also served as an expert witness in more than eighty refugee claim cases involving claimants from the USSR and its successor states.