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Full-Text Articles in Judges
What Makes A Good Judge?, Brian M. Barry
What Makes A Good Judge?, Brian M. Barry
Reports
This article overviews research demonstrating the factors beyond the law that can affect judicial decision-making.
India And Pakistan: A Tale Of Judicial Appointments, Shubhankar Dam
India And Pakistan: A Tale Of Judicial Appointments, Shubhankar Dam
Research Collection Yong Pung How School Of Law
Recent judicial appointments in India and Pakistan have led to battles between their respective judicial and executive branches. In a moment of remarkable constitutional coincidence, two appointments were set aside in India and Pakistan last week. First, India's Supreme Court invalidated the appointment of P. J. Thomas to the Central Vigilance Commission (CVC). Days later, Pakistan's Supreme Court invalidated Deedar Shah's appointment to the National Accountability Bureau (NAB).
Are Appointed Judges Strategic Too?, Joanna Shepherd
Are Appointed Judges Strategic Too?, Joanna Shepherd
Faculty Articles
The conventional wisdom among many legal scholars is that judicial independence can best be achieved with an appointive judiciary; judicial elections turn judges into politicians, threatening judicial autonomy. Yet the original supporters of judicial elections successfully eliminated the appointive systems of many states by arguing that judges who owed their jobs to politicians could never be truly independent. Because the judiciary could function as a check and balance on the other governmental branches only if it truly were independent of them, the reformers reasoned that only popular elections could ensure a truly independent judiciary. Using a data set of virtually …
Super Medians, Lee Epstein, Tonja Jacobi
Super Medians, Lee Epstein, Tonja Jacobi
Faculty Articles
It is not surprising that virtually all analyses of the Supreme Court stress the crucial role played by the swing, pivotal, or median Justice: in theory, the median should be quite powerful. In practice, however, some are far stronger than others. Just as there are “super precedents” and “super statutes”—those that are weightier or more entrenched than others—there are “super medians”—Justices so powerful that they are able to exercise significant control over the outcome and content of the Court’s decisions.
Conventional wisdom holds that Justices accumulate power by virtue of their personality, methodological approach, or even background characteristics. But our …