Professional judges receive a fixed salary and are largely exempt from disciplinary sanctions. How can performance still be secured? Judges share a culture consisting of work-related norms and values, derive status from their standing within the professional community, and are susceptible to...

Although an overwhelming proportion of all legal disputes end in settlement, the determinants of the timing of settlement remain empirically underexplored. We draw on a novel dataset on the duration of commercial disputes in Slovenia to study how the timing of settlement is shaped by the stages...

We utilize case-level data from a large Belgian court to study a policy-relevant but thus far empirically unexplored aspect of judicial behavior: the time that a judge takes to deliberate on a case before rendering a verdict. Exploiting the de facto random administrative assignment of filed...

This article was the Kirby lecture presented in March 2009 at the Southern Cross University in Sydney, Australia. Adrien Wing's keynote speech was in support of Australian retired Justice Michael Kirby's legacy that national courts can and should gain strength from international law. The author...

Finally, an analysis of the present situation in EU gambling and sport betting after the recent ECJ decisions will be attempted, via scenarios from primary (national MS practices, policies, and case law) and secondary (Swiss Institute of Comparative Law, 2006; European Gaming and Betting...

Juries attract both stiff criticism and unqualified praise. Here, we examine how the American juries actually behave in tort cases, based on archival research, post-trial interviews with jurors, experiments with real and simulated juries, observations of real jury deliberations, and surveys of...

Empirical studies of judicial behavior using judge-level data are scarce and almost exclusively focused on higher court judges in the U.S. The majority of disputes in any legal system, however, are adjudicated by lower court judges and conclusions about judicial behavior from one legal system...

On February 18, 2005, President Bush signed the Class Action Fairness Act of 2005 (CAFA), which had been passed by the 109th Congress. The stated purpose of the legislation was “[t]o amend the procedures that apply to consideration of interstate class actions to assure fairer outcomes for...

A research group consisting of the authors of this study determined to carry out comprehensive empirical research on the opinions of lay assessors and professional judges in Hungary. Since such an endeavour had not taken place for more than fifty years, research was now aimed at detailing the...