Scholars have long sought to resolve whether and to what degree political actor diversity influences the outputs of political institutions like legislatures, administrative agencies, and courts. When it comes to the judiciary, diverse judges may greatly affect outcomes. Despite this potential,...

Mass harm situations caused by corporate misbehaviour (e.g. anticompetitive practices, misleading market information), defective products, harmful pharmaceuticals, accidents or environmental disasters nowadays tend to multiply and create new challenges not only for legal actors, but also for...

Third-party funding is an arrangement whereby an outside entity finances the legal representation of a party involved in litigation or arbitration. The outside entity — called a “third-party funder” — could be a bank, hedge fund, insurance company, or some other entity or individual that...

We seek to contribute to an understanding of how judicial elections affect the incentives and decisions of judges. We develop a theoretical model suggesting that judges who are concerned about their reputation would tend to "decide against their prior" as they approach elections. That is, judges...

The authors provide a unique perspective on how the Court of Final Appeal has operated from 1997 to 2010. The study tracks the rising caseload in the Court, considers the statistical profile of the new system of judges and notes the greater attention being paid by the final court to public law cases

Who gets to determine rights and justice? Which mechanism of judicial selection and accountability is optimal? There is no easy answer. If judges are independent experts, nominated and evaluated by their peers, they will be immune from the pressures of electoral rent-seeking, but unaccountable...

Several countries practice a system where laymen, who lack legal education, participate in the judicial decision making. Yet, little is known about their potential influence on the court rulings. In Sweden lay judges (namndeman) are affiliated with the political parties and appointed in...

Social media platforms operate under their own social order. Design decisions and policies set by platforms steer user behavior. Additionally, members of online communities set informal expectations that form a unique set of norms. These social media norms—like oversharing, disinhibition, and...

Since 1990, Colorado has maintained a state-operated judicial performance evaluation (JPE) program for appellate and trial court judges. The program is generally designed to serve four purposes: (1) providing voters in retention elections with information about the judges seeking retention; (2)...

In this Article, I propose a theory of how rational, ideologically motivated judges might choose interpretive methods, and how rational, ideologically motivated laymen -- legislators, litigation organizations, lobbyists, scholars, and citizens -- might respond. I assume, first, that judges not...