This is a preliminary chapter of my book in progress, tentatively titled The New Economics of Zoning Laws. This chapter selectively surveys court decisions on zoning over the past century. I offer new evidence on Nectow v. Cambridge (1927), the first case in which the US Supreme Court overturned...

Much has been written of the success of the conservative bloc on the U.S. Supreme Court since the appointments of Justice Roberts and Justice Alito during the middle of this decade (Epstein, et. al 2007). However, little research has been conducted on the increasingly moderate positions of the...

What role has the US Supreme Court played in the liberalization of the American economy over the last three decades? By examining more than 800 cases of judicial review on issues related to economic policy-making between 1946 and 2012, we show that the Court participated in the post-1980s shift...

The judicialization of politics, or alternatively, politization of the judiciary has been much discussed over the last twenty years. Despite this, the way judges influence fiscal policy outcomes remains, to a large extent, unexplored. This paper attempts, at least partially, to fill this...

This paper assesses the extent to which elected power holders informally intervene in the judiciaries of new democracies, an acknowledged but under-researched topic in studies of judicial politics. The paper first develops an empirical strategy for the study of informal interference based on...

The abstract nature of Constitutional principles, such as the social state principle, requires further interpretation to determine their concrete substance. Their realization is primarily the duty of politics and the legislator. Yet the Constitutional Courts can substantially contribute to...