While the notion of 'Christmas pardons' has been around for some time, there has been almost no empirical research on whether federal executive clemency is in any way patterned in a manner that would legitimize the notion of 'Christmas' or even 'seasonal' pardons. Furthermore, previous research...

The European Court of Justice (ECJ) is a very powerful court compared to other international courts and even national courts of last resort. Observers almost unanimously agree that it is the preliminary references procedure that made the ECJ the powerful court it is today. In this paper, we...

An Optional European Contract Code in the Institutional Competition between European Contract Laws -- Assessment of the Desirability of an Optional European Contract Law -- Evaluation of the European Commission's Impact Assessment Accompanying the Proposal for a Regulation on a CESL.

Using the KOF Index of Globalization and two indices of economic freedom, we empirically analyze whether globalization and economic liberalization affect governments ́respect for human rights using a panel of 106 countries over the 1981-2004 period. According to our results, physical integrity...

We study changes in the form of government as an example of endogenously determined constitutions. For a sample of 202 countries over the period 1950-2006, we find that most changes are relatively small and roughly equally likely to be either in the direction of more parliamentarian or more...

Progress in closing differences in many objective outcomes for blacks relative to whites has slowed, and even worsened, over the past three decades. However, over this period the racial gap in well-being has shrunk. In the early 1970s data revealed much lower levels of subjective well-being...

De jure judicial independence (JI) is the single most important predictor of de facto JI. In this paper, we describe under what conditions countries are likely to include JI in their constitutions. We describe and analyze both their original choice in this regard as well as change over time...

Are there different determinants in the fight against corruption across developing countries? Why are some countries more effective at battling corruption than others? To investigate these concerns we examine the determinants of corruption-control throughout the conditional distribution of the...