These are momentous times for the comparative analysis of judicial behaviour. Once the sole province of U.S. scholars—and mostly political scientists at that—now, researchers throughout the world, drawing on history, economics, law, and psychology, are illuminating how and why judges make the choices they do and what effect those choices have on society. Bringing together leading scholars in the field, The Oxford Handbook of Comparative Judicial Behaviour consists of ten sections, each devoted to important subfields: fundamentals—providing overviews designed to identify common trends in courts worldwide; approaches to judging; data, methods, and technologies; staffing the courts; advocacy, litigation, and appellate review; opinions; relations within, between, and among courts; judicial independence; court and society; and frontiers of comparative judicial behaviour—dedicated to expanding on opportunities for advancement. Rather than focusing on particular courts, countries, or regions, the organization of the individual chapters is topical. Each chapter explores an important topic-critically evaluating the state of that topic and identifying opportunities for future work. While the forty-two chapters share a common interest in explaining the causes and effects of judicial choices, the range of approaches to comparative research is wide, inclusive, and interdisciplinary, from contrasts and similarities to sophisticated research agendas reflecting the emerging field of judicial behaviour around the world.

This book focuses on the decision-making processes in modern collegiate courts. Judges from some of the world s highest and most significant judicial bodies, both national and supranational, share their experiences and reflect on the challenges to which their joint judicial endeavour gives rise.

Laws are imposed on facts. But what is the law to do when its rules for establishing facts do not—because they cannot—produce a satisfactory answer? Scenarios that raise this intractable uncertainty problem have been treated as isolated concerns, but are in fact endemic across legal systems. They can cross jurisdictional and doctrinal boundaries, have recurred throughout history, and demand creative thinking from those faced with them. This book explores the law’s understandings of and responses to such situations from a comparative historical perspective. It investigates how the law has framed these most difficult problems of uncertainty; dealt with uncertainty’s often unclear boundaries; and developed a broad range of different responses to solve or avoid it, across doctrine, time, and jurisdiction. The work examines a selection of key uncertainty problems across private law as elements of a singular uncertainty issue endemic in legal systems. This analysis will be of interest to historians and comparatists, but also to doctrinal, theoretical, and other scholars and practitioners. The analysis leaves us better informed and better equipped for dealing with future scenarios where uncertainty arises, including insights beyond national and doctrinal confines.

Available open access digitally under CC-BY-NC-ND licence. The Court of Appeal in Northern Ireland has functioned without interruption for over a century, yet its intermediate position can obscure the importance of its judgments. This book demonstrates the Court of Appeal’s pivotal role in securing justice, both by correcting lower court decisions and by developing the common law. It examines, in particular, how the Court has applied and developed the rule of law in a post-conflict society. Authored by experts in the law of Northern Ireland, this compelling text is based on archival research, statistical and qualitative case analyses, court observations, and exclusive interviews with senior judges.

For centuries, courts across the common law world have developed systems of law by building bodies of judicial decisions. In deciding individual cases, common law courts settle litigation and move the law in new directions. By virtue of their place at the top of the judicial hierarchy, courts at the apex of common law systems are unique in that their decisions and, in particular, the language used in those decisions, resonate through the legal system. Although both the common law and apex courts have been studied extensively, scholars have paid less attention to the relationship between the two. By analyzing apex courts and the common law from multiple angles, this book offers an entry point for scholars in disciplines related to law – such as political science, history, and sociology – who are seeking a deeper understanding and new insights as to how the common law applies to and is relevant within their own disciplines.

This is a book about international criminal justice written by one of its foremost practitioners and academic thinkers, Judge Theodor Meron. For two decades, Judge Meron has been at the heart of the international criminal justice system, serving as President of the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY), President of the International Residual Mechanism for Criminal Tribunals, and a Judge of the Appeals Chambers of the ICTY and the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda. Drawing on this experience, and his life and career before serving as an international judge, Judge Meron reflects on some of the key questions facing the international criminal justice system. In the opening chapter, Judge Meron writes vividly about his childhood experiences in Poland during World War II, his education, career with the Israeli Foreign Ministry, and subsequent move into academia in the United States. The book continues with Meron's reflections on what it means to transform from a law professor into an international criminal judge, and shifts focus to the criminal courtroom, addressing topics such as the judicial function, the rule of law, and the principle of fairness in trying atrocity crimes: genocide, crimes against humanity, and war crimes. Judge Meron discusses judicial independence and impartiality in international criminal courts, shedding light on the mystery of judicial decision-making and deliberations. Notably, he addresses the controversial subjects of acquittals and the early release of prisoners. Although acquittals are often seen as a failure of international justice, Judge Meron argues that legal principle must come before any extraneous purpose, however desirable that purpose may be. Finally, the book looks ahead at the challenges facing the future of international justice and accountability, and discusses the all-important question: does international criminal justice work?

This Research Handbook is a multi-faceted, comparative analysis of how law and political systems interact around the world. Chapters include analyses of judicial deference, congressional support, democratic representation, politicization of courts, public support, and judicialization across multiple jurisdictions in the United States and abroad. Chapters also investigate transnational courts and the linkages between international and domestic law and politics.

Recent confrontations between constitutional courts and parliamentary majorities in several European countries have attracted international interest in the relationship between the judiciary and the legislature. Some political actors have argued that courts have assumed too much power and politics has been extremely judicialized. This volume accurately and systematically examines the extent to which this aggregation of power may have constrained the dominant political actors’ room for manoeuvre. To explore the diversity and measure the strength of judicial decisions, the contributors to this work have elaborated a methodology to give a more nuanced picture of the practice of constitutional adjudication in Central and Eastern Europe between 1990 and 2020. The work opens with an assessment of the existing literature on empirical analysis of judicial decisions with a special focus on the Central and Eastern European region, and a short summary of the methodology of the project. This is followed by ten country studies and a concluding chapter providing a comprehensive comparative analysis of the results. A further nine countries are explored in the counterpart volume to this book: Constitutional Review in Western Europe: Judicial-Legislative Relations in Comparative Perspective. The collection will be an invaluable resource for those working in the areas of empirical legal research and comparative constitutional law, as well as political scientists interested in judicial politics.

The theme of this book is judicial activism in industrialized democracies, with a chapter on the changing political roles of the courts in the Soviet Union. Eleven contributors describe the extent to which the highest courts in their country of expertise have embraced the making of public policy.

This book consists of general reports of the International Conference on Judicial Management from Comparative Perspective. This conference held on November 8–10, 2017, at Tianjin University, was organized by China Law Society (CLS) and International Association of Procedural Law Congress (IAPL). The general reporters are prominent scholars who have been selected worldwide by the IAPL Presidium to organize national reporters who shall do researches of his/her own state under the guide of the general reporter’s questionnaire on the specific subject. By this way, the comparative studies are trying to depend on national researches but overcome the general style of “talk past each other.” Moreover, the general reports summarize and give comment on the various system, phenomena or situation from comparative perspective, from which the audience will read their own orientation, doctrines and theories.