But things are not always as peaceful as they seem. As with any revolution, those who take power often find themselves with no choice but to rely on the very institutions that they sought to overthrow.

One case in point: the justice system. After the Velvet Revolution, it would have been a natural impulse to simply purge the courts, burn the communist law books and start the whole thing over from scratch. But first impulses are often worst impulses — that approach would have almost certainly led to lawlessness, judicial chaos and worse.

So the dissidents who took power found themselves in the untenable position of embracing at least certain elements of the previous regime, if for no other reason than to keep society from collapsing into anarchy. Time, they reasoned, would allow them to untangle all the knots.

Flash forward 16 years. Judges find themselves haunted by rulings that they issued under the thumb of the old regime. Others are dogged by allegations of past communist misdeeds, well after they received a clean bill of political health from the lustration process — the name given to vetting officials' political past, derived from the Latin word for "ritual ablution." Still more simply took on high-ranking positions with unconcealed histories that remained unnoticed or unremarked upon.

With the sudden outbreak of communist controversies surrounding high-ranking judges, however, Justice Minister Pavel Nemec has ordered an immediate, full audit of the lustrations of 60 key judges, determined to purge all traces of the system's communist past. But the nation itself has nearly 3,000 judges, along with more than 1,000 prosecutors. It would be virtually impossible — not to mention impossibly expensive — to fully lustrate the system to a moral certainty.

Which raises a difficult question: Does the public really want that anyway? The inescapable truth is that to rise to a position of judicial authority under communism, a jurist needed to either be a party member or at least be deemed sympathetic to the party's interests.

So now, after the fall of communism, society must make a choice: Does it want a judicial population of veteran, knowledgeable legal scholars who may run the risk of checkered histories, or does it want fresh, clean jurists filling the ranks of the highest courts who may lack the insight that only practice and experience can provide?

It's an insoluble problem, not so unlike Solomon splitting the baby.

Perhaps an object lesson lies in the adjunct to the court system, the police force. Many tourists express surprise at the relative youth of even ranking officers — by some counts, about 75 percent of the force joined after 1989 — and many visitors and residents alike express frustration at the perceived ineffectiveness of the force overall. Some have even gone on to suggest, fairly or not, that such inexperience contributed to the loss of control during of the CzechTek raid July 30.

Hungary and Slovakia, have thrown up their hands at the vetting issue, opting for no judicial lustration practice at all. Czechs prefer to remember; but why not consider a graduated process of lustration, in which lower courts accept judges with some degree of politically questionable pasts, but high courts accept only judges with reputations beyond reproach?