An explosion of Eighth Amendment challenges to lethal injection protocols has struck the federal courts. The Supreme Court's recent decision in Hill v. McDonough,1 which empowered prisoners to bring challenges to lethal injection procedures under 42 U.S.C. para. 1983, has facilitated a flood of new lethal injection cases. In response, several courts have ordered states to alter their protocols,...

The collection of overdue fines in state courts throughout the United States is a complex problem. Significantly, large overdue balances on many state courts' books present an ineffective judicial system to legislators and to the public. The cost of justice is extremely high and requires considerable expenditure of public funds. This project will identify a variety of techniques and tools that ...

When a court concludes that an agency’s decision is erroneous, the ordinary rule is to remand to the agency to consider the issue anew (as opposed to the court deciding the issue itself). Although the Supreme Court first articulated this ordinary remand rule in the 1940s and has rearticulated it repeatedly over the years, little work has been done to understand how the rule works in practice, m...

Information and communication technogies have led to dynamic changes in the way courts of law perform thier duty to deliver justice. Courts of law depend on the availability, comprehensiveness and quality of information relating to the case in reaching a conclusive and fair verdict. Courts will not be able to deliver justice in the cases where records are not properly managed; thus, depriving t...

We present a simple sequential bargaining model of a collegial court, analogous to Baron and Ferejohn’s sequential bargaining model of a legislature. However, the model incorporates critical features of appellate court jurisprudence — including disposition votes and coalitions, opinion assignment, opinion writing, and voting over draft opinions to create a majority opinion —so that it is indeed...

How do disagreements between judges on collegial (multimember) courts affect legal policy? We address this question by developing an account of the nature of judicial disagreements in the case-space model of judicial choice. We distinguish between different types of disagreement, from disagreements about case facts to disagreements about how legal rules should treat varying case facts, and cons...

This Federal Judicial Center publication was undertaken in furtherance of the Center's statutory mission to conduct and stimulate research and development for the improvement of judicial administration. The views expressed are those of the authors and not necessarily those of the Federal Judicial Center.

Courts assessing compensatory damages awards often lack adequate information to determine the value of a victim’s loss. A central reason for this problem, which the literature has thus far overlooked, is that courts face a dilemma when applying their standard information-forcing tools to the context of damages. Specifically, the standard method by which courts obtain information is through a bu...