Among political scientists who study the courts, explanation of judicial behavior is the issue that receives the most attention. That issue is also a major concern in legal scholarship. Of course, judicial behavior takes many forms and occurs in many settings. The aspect of judicial behavior on which scholars typically concentrate is the decisions that appellate courts (and especially the Supre...

The 9/11 suicide attacks in New York, Washington, D.C., and Pennsylvania, triggered a number of security responses both in the United States of America and other Countries in the World. Kenya, which is an ally and a close partner to North America and Europe, was not left behind. While many states had been parties to numerous terrorism conventions, their response in implementing them had been sl...

This paper reviews a variety of criteria which have been proposed for legislative and congressional redistricting in the US and discusses the political and legal factors which have shaped 1980s redistricting. Particular attention is paid to the conflicts of interest between incumbents (seeking re-election), party organizations (seeking aggregate partisan advantage), minority interests (seeking ...

This Essay offers a brief and highly speculative political, intellectual, and legal history of the theory of the unitary executive in the late twentieth century. I suggest that that theory developed in three stages, which I label the weak, the strong, and the super-strong versions, and confronted one alternative that superficially resembled the theory of the unitary executive but that actually ...

Improving the environment for business is an important part of the growth strategy of Abenomics. As the goal for this effort, the Abe Administration aims to improve Japan’s rank in the World Bank Doing Business Ranking to one of the top three among OECD. This paper clarifies what it takes for Japan to achieve the goal. By looking at details of the World Bank Doing Business ranking, we identify ...

As the articles in the recent special issue on harm reduction illustrate, the last decade has seen an impressive expansion of harm reduction in public health. Policies and programs using it have dramatically improved the formerly ignored health problems of marginalized populations. This article looks at the history of harm reduction, and the growing role that the medicalization of social and po...

This study uses a cross-country panel to examine the determinants of corruption, paying particular attention to political institutions that increase accountability. Even though the theoretical literature has stressed the importance of political institutions in determining corruption, the empirical literature is relatively scarce. Our results confirm the role of political institutions in determi...

The key to understanding law and authority in late eighteenth-century Ireland lies in extraordinary cases. Some historians have dismissed the political trials of reformers and activists as unrepresentative of the "typical" processes of the Irish judicial system. They argue that the majority of Irishmen in the eighteenth century did not believe that their society was particularly violent and tha...

Prof. Andreas Wimmer Director at ZEF Since the end of the cold war, the development policy debate has undergone a remarkable transformation. Whereas before, the political and legal environment of a developing country has been scarcely taken into consideration, today human rights, good governance, the rule of law and democracy, peaceful conflict settlement etc. have become central elements of de...