Because civil-law systems hire unproven jurists into career judiciaries, many maintain elaborate incentive structures to prevent their judges from shirking. We use personnel data (backgrounds, judicial decisions, job postings) on 275 Japanese judges to explore general determinants of career...

Although the executive branch appoints Japanese Supreme Court justices as it does in the United States, a personnel office under the control of the Supreme Court rotates lower court Japanese judges through a variety of posts. This creates the possibility that politicians might indirectly use the...

This is one chapter from the book, Judicial Independence: Economic Theory and Japanese Empirics, that Mark Ramseyer and Eric Rasmusen are writing. In preceding chapters we explain the institutions of modern Japan's judiciary and use regression analysis to test whether judges who rule in ways the...