Challenges and Opportunities of Judicial Independence

It has been nearly a decade since Stephen Burbank and Barry Friedman edited their impressive volume, Judicial Independence at the Crossroads. One of the enduring lessons of that book was that research on judicial independence was, and ought to be, fundamentally interdisciplinary in nature. In the years since its publication, we have witnessed a substantial volume of research on the subject, and this work has certainly spanned multiple fields in law and the social sciences. Importantly, the questions that we are asking, the arguments we propose and the empirical tests we conduct are simply not all that different whether we are talking about American judges or judges abroad or even judges on international judicial bodies. Far from making us speak past each other, variation in sociopolitical and institutional context provides us leverage over the questions we seek to answer. Indeed, it is our view that as a scholarly subject, judicial independence raises concerns that are special cases of broader questions of institutional design. For these reasons, there is much to gain from conceiving of ourselves as writing in one coherent literature, linked not by region or governance system, but rather by the research challenges we confront.1