This article analyzes whether the much-touted independence of the Conseil Constitutionnel (CC), the French Constitutional Court, is genuine. We construct a data set that comprises all the rulings of the CC between 1959 and 2006, taking into account the composition of the CC as well as the...

In this paper we test to what extent the Kelsenian-type of constitutional judges are independent from political parties by studying of the Portuguese Constitutional Court. The results yield three main conclusions. First, constitutional judges in Portugal are quite sensitive to their political...

This paper examines the partisan patterns in state supreme court elections for the period 1981 through 2020. It shows that those elections have become more partisan across all election formats: partisan, semi-partisan, nonpartisan, and retention. The greatest change has been in nonpartisan...

This Article presents a comprehensive overview of the Supreme Court's ballot-access jurisprudence as it relates to minor political parties, and challenges the conventional "structuralist" view that ascribes shortcomings in the Court's approach to the doctrinal constraints of an...

The German Constitutional Court has powers that are no weaker than the powers of the US Supreme Court. Justices are openly selected by the political parties. Nonetheless, public and professional perception are strikingly different. Justices at the German court are not believed to be guided by...