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...

Programming online judges are computing resources with pre-designed test data. Recently, an increasing attention has been paid on integration of online judges into a tutoring system. However, it is difficult for a local system to automatic interaction with remote online judges on the web to share their computation, because these computing resources are designed for human users only. To address ...

Segal and Spaeth’s The Supreme Court and the Attitudinal Model Revisisted argues that judges are policymakers who decide cases primarily (and sometimes exclusively) on the basis of their personal policy preferences. This is particularly true of Supreme Court justices, for the American political system leaves them unconstrained when issuing decisions on the merits. Segal and Spaeth label this th...

In problem-solving courts judges are no longer neutral arbitrators in adversarial justice processes. Instead, judges directly engage with court participants. The movement towards problem-solving court models emerges from a collaborative therapeutic jurisprudence framework. While most scholars argue judges are the central courtroom actors within problem-solving courts, we find judges are the sta...

Why do some international courts and judges extensively borrow from other international courts while others do not? Answers to this question have important implications for debates on transjudicial communication, the diffusion of international legal norms, and international judicial behavior. Judges may use external sources because they help improve decisions or because it fits their ideologica...

We present a positive political theory of criminal sentencing and test it using data from the United States Sentencing Commission. Under the U.S. Sentencing Guidelines, judges can use “offense-level adjustments” (fact-based decisionmaking) to lengthen or shorten the Guidelines’ presumptive sentences. Judges also can use “departures” from the Guidelines (law-based decisionmaking) to lengthen or ...

Some states have allocated the authority to determine the amount of punitive damages to judges rather than to juries. This study explored the determination of damages by jury-eligible citizens and trial court judges. The punitive damage awards of both groups were of similar magnitude and variability. The compensatory damages ofjurors were marginally lower but, in some conditions, were more vari...

3 simulation models were applied to clinical judgments of "psychotic" vs. "neurotic" for 29 judges across 7 samples of MMPI profiles. A crossvalidated multiple correlation was used as a goodness-of-fit measure for the 3 judgment models. On this basis, each of the 29 clinical judges was characterized as being either "linear" or "configural" in his utilization of MMPI test data, where configurali...

Previous studies have scrutinized the decision-making process of physicians involved in the civil commitment of mentally ill persons, but few have examined the process used by probate judges when deciding to issue orders of detention and when conducting commitment hearings. This study consisted of a written survey sent to all probate court judges (n = 68) in South Carolina. Factors examined in ...

We develop an informational model of judicial decision-making in which deference to precedent is useful to policy-oriented appellate judges because it improves the accuracy with which they can communicate legal rules to trial judges. Our simple model yields new implications and hypotheses regarding conditions under which judges will maintain or break with precedent, the constraining effect that...