Judicial decisions concerning the nuclear power began to split

Evidence-Based Medicine in judicial decisions concerning right to healthcare

OBJECTIVE To analyze, from the examination of decisions issued by Brazilian courts, how Evidence-Based Medicine was applied and if it led to well-founded decisions, searching the best scientific knowledge. METHODS The decisions made by the Federal Courts were searched, with no time limits, at the website of the Federal Court Council, using the expression "Evidence-Based Medicine". With regard...

Extraneous factors in judicial decisions.

Are judicial rulings based solely on laws and facts? Legal formalism holds that judges apply legal reasons to the facts of a case in a rational, mechanical, and deliberative manner. In contrast, legal realists argue that the rational application of legal reasons does not sufficiently explain the decisions of judges and that psychological, political, and social factors influence judicial rulings...

Judicial Politics and Sentencing Decisions∗

Racial and gender disparities are prevalent in the criminal justice system, but the sources of these disparities remain largely unknown. This paper investigates whether judge political affiliation contributes to these disparities using data on over 500,000 federal defendants linked to sentencing judge. Exploiting random case assignment, we find that Republican appointed judges sentence black de...

Malapportionment and Judicial Power

Weighing and Balancing in the Justification of Judicial Decisions

In legal theory, it is widely claimed that decisions in hard cases are based on weighing and balancing. However no reconstructions are given of the deep structure of the complex argumenation underlying the justification of these decisions. The author develops a model for the analysis of weighing and balancing of arguments in the justification of judicial decisions that are based on teleological...