This article aims to curb the enthusiasm for post-Communist judicial empowerment by showing that sometimes a powerful judiciary can threaten the rule of law. It argues that the powerful Bulgarian Constitutional Court promotes conflict between the executive and the ordinary judiciary. The “war of institutions” has made Bulgaria the poster child for failed judicial reforms among new European Unio...

Ken Kurzweil rightfully called the Judicial Workshop a success. Much was discussed and prospects for an effective judicial system appear good. But let's highlight, for a moment, those who made the Workshop a success. It was motivated by students, people such as Ken Kurzweil, Ken Blaisdell, Alan Ceppos, Barry Kirschner, Michele Mazepa, Mario Arthur and Sharon Stiller (with apologies to any unmen...

Judicial independence is an idea that has both internal (or normative) and external (or institutional) aspects. From a normative viewpoint, judges should be autonomous moral agents, who can be relied on to carry out their public duties independent of venal or ideological considerations. Independence, or impartiality, in this sense is a desirable aspect of a judge’s character. But judges are hum...

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Judicial decisions established legal standards for prison conditions and the treatment of prisoners. Prisoners used the litigation process to seek judicial enforcement of these rights-based standards that restricted the autonomy previously enjoyed by correctional officials. Judicial intervention into corrections transformed corrections by pushing all correctional institutions to become professi...

The cost of enforcing contracts is a key determinant of market performance. We document this point with reference to the credit market. We start by presenting a model of opportunistic debtors and inefficient courts. According to the model, improvements in judicial efficiency reduce credit rationing and increase lending, while have an ambiguous effect on interest rates, depending on banking comp...

Shadd Maruna, in his masterpiece, Making Good (Maruna, 2001, 2011) advocates the creation of an institutionalized redemption ritual which would reinforce the offender's own certitude that he or she has indeed desisted successfully, and convince the community and society itself, that he/she has now become a good citizen. Such a ritual , which would preferably be judicial, exists in the French le...

In this study, we analyze the process of collaborative problem solving from the viewpoint of thinking styles. Thinking styles are defined as a preferred way of thinking; here, we focused on three styles: Legislative, Executive, and Judicial. In this study, we created groups whose members displayed different thinking styles, and asked the groups to solve a creative task collaboratively. If think...