Kategoria BISAC: Law >> Judicial Power

Judges play a central role in the American legal system, but their behavior as decision-makers is not well understood, even among themselves. The system permits judges to be quite secretive (and most of them are), so indirect methods are required to make sense of their behavior. Here, a political scientist, an economist, and a judge work together to construct a unified theory of judicial decision-making. Using statistical methods to test hypotheses, they dispel the mystery of how judicial decisions in district courts, circuit courts, and the Supreme Court are made.

The authors derive...

The Judge as Political Theorist examines opinions by constitutional courts in liberal democracies to better understand the logic and nature of constitutional review. David Robertson argues that the constitutional judge's role is nothing like that of the legislator or chief executive, or even the ordinary judge. Rather, constitutional judges spell out to society the implications--on the ground--of the moral and practical commitments embodied in the nation's constitution. Constitutional review, in other words, is a form of applied political theory.

Robertson takes an...

Set adjacent to "victims" and "bystanders," "perpetrators" are by no means marginalized figures in human rights scholarship. Nevertheless, the extent to which the perpetrator is not only socially imagined but also sociologically constructed remains a central concern in studies of state-authorized mass violence. This interdisciplinary collection of essays builds upon such work by strategically interrogating the terms through which such a figure is read via law, society, and culture. Of particular concern to the contributors to this volume are the ways in which notions of "violation" and...

A highly original and empirically-informed study of the performance of judicial authority in the lower criminal courts, bringing together extensive socio-legal research and interviews with magistrates, judges and court staff to offer up a more varied and nuanced analysis of the legitimacy of judicial decision-making.

A recent true story that happened in Hawaii, the 50th state of this nation. Author was sued for legal malpractice. The trial judge who was married to one of author's ultimate legal opponents failed to disclose her conflict and be recused. An influential justice who decided the appeal was the law partner of the attorney who sued her. Portions of the court transcripts in the book literally show the negative and destructive emotions of the ruling class against the author, while they ignored their severe conflicts of interest and refused to be recused. And they are totally immune from...