Gender Bias in the Judicial System (-Reform)

Judicial Reform and the Reform of the Labor Dispute Resolution System

INTRODUCTION Since the collapse of the bubble economy in the early 1990’s, Japan’s industrial society experienced a drastic increase in individual employment disputes. At the same time, union management disputes have been clearly on the decline since the 1980’s. To cope with such a structural change of labor disputes, it was necessary to restructure the labor dispute resolution system, which wa...

Does Political Bias in the Judiciary Matter?: Implications of Judicial Bias Studies for Legal and Constitutional Reform

Recent empirical scholarship that shows that judges decide cases in a manner that is consistent with their political biases has motivated a stream of proposals for reform, including judicial term limits, limitations on judicial review of statutes and agency actions, revision of the judicial appointments process, and mandatory mixed party representation on judicial panels. However, these proposa...

Health System Reform in the United States

In 2010, the United States adopted its first-ever comprehensive set of health system reforms in the Affordable Care Act (ACA). Implementation of the law, though politically contentious and controversial, has now reached a stage where reversal of most elements of the law is no longer feasible. The controversial portions of the law that expand affordable health insurance coverage to most U.S. cit...

Understanding the Judicial Role in Addressing Gender Bias: A View from the Eighth Circuit Federal Court System

The role of trial judges in the litigation process is frequently debated. Are judges to be dispassionate adjudicators, disengaged referees in a sport in which attorneys compete? Or are they charged with a more active role in promoting the substance, form, and process of justice? In the present paper, we explore the judicial role in addressing gender bias in federal litigation, using data gather...

First Steps to Judicial Reform