Current approaches for the design of Online Dispute Resolution (ODR) systems involve the replication of Alternative Dispute Resolution practices such as mediation and negotiation. Though such systems have been found to be popular, there are concerns that these systems fail to take into account judicial practices. In this paper a system that supports disputants' decisions making when engaged in ...

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...

The judicial production of law and the legislative production of law make a striking distinction between the two legal traditions. Despite of these differences, judges in both legal traditions in adjudicating cases have a common task, which is the application of legal rules to the facts of cases pending for judgments. The tension between the certainty and the “discretion” is universal for any l...

In 2014 we celebrate the 150 anniversary of the Judicial Reform in Russia. The 1860 are known as a time of major reforms in various spheres of life, one of them being the Judicial Reform adopted in 1864. Before 1864 civil procedure was considered to be the classical form of inquisitorial justice with active judges and passive parties. Inquisitorial procedure was a written process conducted in s...

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...

The use of multimedia data has expanded into many domains and applications beyond technical usage, such as surveillance, home monitoring, health supervision, judicial applications. This work is concerned with the application of video processing techniques to judicial trials in order to extract useful information from them. The automated processing of the large amounts of digital data generated ...

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...

This brief report presents a study undertaken to better understand the training needs of judicial officers related to military issues. A snowball sample of judicial officers and court-affiliated stakeholders were asked to identify the most critical training topics regarding military issues in juvenile and family court, as well as rate the importance of 13 potential training topics. The highest ...

Nowadays, ontology is applied as an integral part of many applications in several domains, especially in the world of law. The ontology based judicial support system is believed as a useful tool to support, for example, the legal argumentation assistant and legal decision taking in court. The privacy case analyzer is considered as one of the most interesting applications of ontology based priva...

We ask whether the widely used direction of decision and direction of vote variables in the United States Supreme Court Judicial Database (USSCJD) are contaminated by confirmation bias, or have been affected by expectations about the likely effects of judicial preferences on case outcomes. Using a sample of generally comparable cases, we find evidence that the assignment of issue codes to these...