Valery Zorkin
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Valery Dmitrievich Zorkin is the first and the current Chairman of the Constitutional Court of the Russian Federation.
Zorkin was born on 18 February 1943 in a rural area of the Maritime Province. In 1964, he matriculated from the Law Department of the Moscow University, in which he delivered lectured until the late 1980s. By that time he wrote a thesis and became recognized as a leading specialist on the legal doctrines of Boris Chicherin. During the last two years of the Soviet Union's existence, he led a group of legal experts working for the Soviet Constitutional Commission.
In October 1991 he became a judge of the Constitutional Court of Russia and on 1 November was elected the court's first (and only) chairman with unlimited tenure. During the Russian constitutional crisis of 1993, Zorkin was involved into bitter disputes as to the legitimacy of Boris Yeltsin's decision to dissolve the Supreme Soviet, a decision which ran contrary to the outdated RSFSR constitution. Zorkin is often credited with having stood behind the court's ruling which declared Yeltsin's decision unconstitutional. Although the ruling was in agreement with the Constitution, Yeltsin had the work of the court suspended and forced Zorkin to resign.
After the new Constitution of the Russian Federation was promulgated in 1993, Zorkin resumed his work as a judge of the Constitutional Court. Ten years after the court's decision that made him famous, on February 24, 2003, he was reelected the court's chairman. Many observers viewed his return to the office as corroborating the validity of the court's apprisal of Yeltsin's actions in 1993.
