A. IntroductionThe project Judges under Stress aims to elaborate on a more in-depth understanding of the historical process that is often covered by the "grand narratives." These are commonly built on the notions of old institutionalism focusing on formal institutions, providing clear-cut, stable, rigid, unquestionable versions of the past. Our quest is to dismantle these narratives.The grand narratives lack the understanding that the countries' transition may not depend solely on a change of formal rules. They focus on important events, ruptures, during which the formal framework changes. However, the change may be rooted in a shift of informal norms, personnel, tradition, and culture. Narratives are easy to follow; they are likely to be heard and easily retold. They are often described in a limited scope because of the hesitance of taking a challenge to consider all the social development, everyday life, ideology, resistance, obedience, legislature, common sense, academic works, and other factors. Therefore, the narratives are often told periodically, as one block of events, chronologically coming after another, distinguished only by a beginning and an end. However, our project would like to doubt rigid concepts of beginnings and ends. What often might be considered a start of some era may be a continuation of the previous process and previous decisions from limited possibilities of past choices.An institution is a crucial concept. It is a structure, a web of events, decisions, knowledge, rules, traditions, habits, morals that form social life. Douglass North defines institutions as "humanly devised constraints that structure political, economic and social interaction." 1 Institutions define roles, relations, and powers. People fill these positions and thereby form organizations. Moreover, in institutions, we may find more intricate structures that explain reality in a more detailed, verifiable, and reliable way. Deconstruction of the institution may show us, for example, that what might be a significant rupture in the political sphere of social reality, might still be represented by continuity in the field of personnel of state administration or habitus of the members of the group that contradicts the aims of the formal rules. While the grand narratives focus on discontinuities of formal rules, the informal continuities stay often overseen.We decided to deconstruct these narratives and verify them with knowledge of the past and extensive archival work. Our project aims to research the specific events, policies, and This special issue emerged from the project Judges under Stress -The Breaking Point of Judicial Institutions Project. The project is financed by the FRIPRO program of the Norwegian Research Council and the University of Oslo (2019Oslo ( -2022.
