Judges Commons^™

Between Judicial Oligarchy And Parliamentary Supremacy: Understanding The Court's Dilemma In Constitutional Judicial Review, Seow Hon Tan

Research Collection Yong Pung How School Of Law

This article considers the dilemma that constitutional judicial review presents to the most well-meaning of judges — that of navigating the narrow and difficult road between parliamentary supremacy and judicial oligarchy. It examines the Singapore Court of Appeal’s delineation of legal and extra-legal considerations in view of Ronald Dworkin’s theory of adjudication in determining the constitutionality of section 377A of the Penal Code in Lim Meng Suang v. Attorney General. It proposes an alternative natural law approach to constitutional judicial review based on Radbruch’s formula, which helps courts to avoid the pitfalls of judicial idiosyncrasies and usurpation of legislative mandate …

How Being Right Can Risk Wrongs, Paul H. Robinson, Sarah M. Robinson

All Faculty Scholarship

This is a chapter from the new book The Vigilante Echo. Previous chapters have made clear that some vigilantism can be morally justified where the government has failed in its promise under the social contract to protect and to do justice. But this chapter explains how even moral vigilante action can be problematic for the larger society. Vigilantes may try to do the right thing but are likely to lack the training and professional neutrality of police. They may be successful, but only on pushing the crime problem to an adjacent neighborhood. Because their open lawbreaking may seem admirable …

Shadow Vigilante Officials Manipulate And Distort To Force Justice From An Apparently Reluctant System, Paul H. Robinson, Sarah M. Robinson

All Faculty Scholarship

The real danger of the vigilante impulse is not of hordes of citizens, frustrated by the system’s doctrines of disillusionment, rising up to take the law into their own hands. Frustration can spark a vigilante impulse but such classic aggressive vigilantism is not the typical response. More common is the expression of disillusionment in less brazen ways, by a more surreptitious undermining and distortion of the operation of the criminal justice system.

Shadow vigilantes, as they might be called, can affect the operation of the system in a host of important ways. For example, when people act as classic vigilantes …

Access To Justice?: A Study Of Access Restrictions On The Papers Of U.S. Supreme Court Justices, Susan David Demaine, Benjamin J. Keele

Articles by Maurer Faculty

For scholars of law, history, and government—and the American public—the papers of all Supreme Court Justices are of vital importance. They contribute to biographies, histories, and legal critiques. Our understanding of the Court and its decisions is enriched by access to the thinking of the justices. In turn, this knowledge informs our views on our laws and social order and helps shape the future of our legal, political, and even moral culture. Despite the importance of these papers, many justices who have donated their papers in the past 75 years or so have placed restrictions on access to the collection. …

Just The Facts? Media Coverage Of Female And Male High Court Appointees In Five Democracies, Maria C. Escobar-Lemmon, Valerie Hoekstra, Alice Kang, Miki Caul Kittilson

Department of Political Science: Faculty Publications

In this article, we examine gender differences in news media portrayals of nominees to high courts and whether those differences vary across country and time. Although past research has examined gender differences in news media coverage of candidates for elective office, few studies have looked at media coverage of high court nominees. As women are increasingly nominated to courts around the world, it is important to examine how nominations are covered by the news media and whether there is significant variation in coverage based on gender. We analyze media coverage of high court justices in five democracies: Argentina, Australia, Canada, …

The Long Shadow Of Bush V. Gore: Judicial Partisanship In Election Cases, Michael S. Kang, Joanna M. Shepherd

Faculty Articles

Bush v. Gore decided a presidential election and is the most dramatic election case in our lifetime, but cases like it are decided every year at the state level. Ordinary state courts regularly decide questions of election rules and administration that effectively determine electoral outcomes hanging immediately in the balance. Election cases like Bush v. Gore embody a fundamental worry with judicial intervention into the political process: outcome-driven, partisan judicial decisionmaking. The Article investigates whether judges decide cases, particularly politically sensitive ones, based on their partisan loyalties more than the legal merits of the cases. It presents a novel method …

The Ideal Judge: How Implicit Bias Shapes Assessment Of State Judges, Rebecca D. Gill, Rafael Oganesyan

Political Science Faculty Research

Judicial Performance Evaluation (JPE) is generally seen as an important part of the merit system, which often suffers from a lack of relevant voter information. Utah’s JPE system has undergone significant change in recent years. Using data from the two most recent JPE surveys, we provide a preliminary look at the operation of this new system. Our results suggest that the survey component has difficulty distinguishing among the judges on the basis of relevant criteria. The question prompts intended to measure performance on different ABA categories are also indistinguishable. We find evidence that, on some measures, female judges do disproportionately …

The Questionable Origins Of The Copyright Infringement Analysis, Shyamkrishna Balganesh

All Faculty Scholarship

Central to modern copyright law is its test for determining infringement, famously developed by Judge Jerome Frank in the landmark case of Arnstein v. Porter. The “Arnstein test,” which courts continue to apply, demands that the analysis be divided into two components, actual copying — the question whether the defendant did in fact copy, and improper appropriation — the question whether such copying, if it did exist, was unlawful. Somewhat counter-intuitively though, the test treats both components as pure questions of fact, requiring that even the question of improper appropriation go to a jury. This jury-centric approach continues to influence …

The Distinctive Role Of Justice Samuel Alito: From A Politics Of Restoration To A Politics Of Dissent, Neil S. Siegel

Faculty Scholarship

Justice Samuel Alito is regarded by both his champions and his critics as the most consistently conservative member of the current Supreme Court. Both groups seem to agree that he has become the most important conservative voice on the Court. Chief Justice John Roberts has a Court to lead; Justice Antonin Scalia and his particular brand of originalism have passed on; Justice Clarence Thomas is a stricter originalist and so writes opinions that other Justices do not join; and Justice Anthony Kennedy can be ideologically unreliable. Justice Alito, by contrast, is unburdened by the perceived responsibilities of being Chief Justice, …

How Bayesian Are Judges?, Jack Knight, Mitu Gulati, David F. Levi

Faculty Scholarship

Richard Posner famously modeled judges as Bayesians in his book, How Judges Think? A key element of being Bayesian is that one constantly updates with new information. This model of the judge who is constantly learning and updating, particularly about local conditions, also is one of the reasons why the factual determinations of trial judges are given deference on appeal. But do judges in fact act like Bayesian updaters? Judicial evaluations of search warrant requests for probable cause provides an ideal setting to examine this question because the judges in this context have access to information on how well they …

Material Facts In The Debate Over Twombly And Iqbal, Jonah B. Gelbach

All Faculty Scholarship

This paper presents empirical evidence concerning the adjudication of defendant-filed summary judgment motions from nearly 2,000 randomly selected employment discrimination and contracts cases to try to assess Twombly and Iqbal’s performance in filtering cases according to merit. I first explain how such data might be helpful in such an assessment, taking into account the possibility that parties’ behavior might have changed following Twombly and Iqbal.

I then report results indicating that even using this large collection of data -- the most comprehensive data assembled to date to address this question -- we cannot tell whether “TwIqbal” …