How does a court’s policy-making authority shape the nature of judicial behavior? We argue that judicial systems that limit policy-making authority also discourage the politicization of courts, encouraging judges to think narrowly about the interests of litigating parties. In contrast,...

On July 29, 1998, Justice Clarence Thomas spoke to the National Bar Association, the nation's largest organization of black lawyers. No, he did not wander in off the street; he slipped in through the side door of competing interests, just as he slipped onto the Supreme Court seven years...

Martin and Quinn used item response theory based on the Markov-Chain-Monte-Carlo method to estimate justices’ locations on a one-dimensional scale. Their analysis has been received with interest and doubts by the legal community. This paper explores the Markov Chain Monte Carlo algorithm in...

The German Constitutional Court is radically different from the (mostly US) courts in which panel effects have been studied so widely. On the one hand, to a large extent, ideological and gender bias are neutralized by design. On the other hand, panels are not randomly composed. This makes it...

We use NOMINATE (Nominal Three Step Estimation) (Poole and Rosenthal, 1983, 1997) to estimate ideal points for all Supreme Court Justices in Brazil from 2002 to 2012. Based on these estimated preferences we identify the nature of the two main dimensions along which disagreements tend to occur in...

Article 33 of Indonesia's Constitution requires the state to 'control' important branches of production and natural resources. The meaning of 'control' has been a matter of significant debate since Indonesia's independence: does it require the state to manage directly, or is regulation enough?...

We use NOMINATE (Nominal Three Step Estimation) (Poole and Rosenthal, 1983, 1997) to estimate ideal pointsfor all Supreme Court Justices in Brazil from 2002 to 2012. Based on these estimated preferences we identify the nature of the two main dimensions along which disagreements tend to occur in...