Widespread vote buying has long marred Taiwan's elections and this malpractice has been an issue of great concern to many on the island. This study aims at examining the decisions of Taiwan's three-tiered court system -- district, high, and Supreme Court -- regarding vote-buying litigation. In...

The status of child custody and adoption rights for GLBTQ individuals varies dramatically by state. This paper seeks to explain some of this variation by examining state Supreme Court decisions regarding the child rearing rights of sexual minorities. I use content analysis to code major court...

The paper will discuss the effect of judicial policymaking on marriage equality and adoption by gay parents in the United States over the past two decades. It will focus on the importance of the court's perception of its role as a subordinate or coordinate policymaker in accomplishing the...

Although federal courts have exclusive jurisdiction over bankruptcy cases, once a petition is filed the matter is referred to the Bankruptcy Court, an Article One court of limited jurisdiction and limited judicial independence. Among proceedings the Bankruptcy court can adjudicate are core...

I argue that the Supreme Court should be studied as a democratic representative institution. While normative political theorists do not tend to view the Court as representative, their theorizing has produced a concept of representation that can be used a starting point for studying the Court....

This is a collaborative study examining the relationship between popular reality-based judge television shows, 'tort tales,' and the politics of tort reform. TV judge shows share or approximate many features of the tort tale described by Haltom and McCann in Distorting the Law: Politics, Media,...

This study invokes the common space scores of executives and senators to generate a number of alternative preference point positions for U.S. District Court judges (1901-2006). Tests of these continuous measures against a null case fact specification suggest that the legal model always proves an...

While scholars have paid a great deal of attention to legislative and executive institutionalization, limited work exists on the institutionalization of judiciaries and its consequences. McGuireﾒs work (2004) examining the development of the Supreme Court reveals that the institutionalization...

Since the US Supreme Court decided Republican Party of Minnesota v. White in 2002, there have been serious questions about the constitutionality of Judicial Canons which bar judicial candidates from activity and speech that would clearly be constitutionally protected if engaged in by...

There is a wealth of scholarship examining how judicial attitudes affect appellate decision-making. Less attention, however, has been paid to the attitudes of trial judges. While there is some scholarship examining the objective actions of trial judges, there is very little examining how their...