Judicial independence is widely considered to be a foundation for the rule of law (Council of Europe 1998; United Nations 1985), and establishing judicial independence in developing and transition economies has become a major goal of donor-supported legal and judicial reform programs. This topic brief will address three questions related to judicial independence. First, what exactly does "judic...

Document drafting is an essential component of judicial problem solving. This paper distinguishes several classes of judicial documents based on (1) the stage of the judicial process in which they are created, (2) the complexity of the documents, and (3) the party who drafts the documents: a judge, judicial support personnel, or a litigant. Three approaches to automated document drafting are id...

Selective non-treatment decisions involving severely handicapped neonates have recently come under renewed judicial and legislative scrutiny. In this Article, the Author examines the legal, ethical and social considerations attendant to the non-treatment decision. In Part II of this Article the Author discusses the predominant ethical viewpoints relating to this issue and proposes a new moral s...

Judicial sentencing decisions should be guided by facts, not by chance. The present research however demonstrates that the sentencing decisions of experienced legal professionals are influenced by irrelevant sentencing demands even if they are blatantly determined at random. Participating legal experts anchored their sentencing decisions on a given sentencing demand and assimilated toward it ev...

On July 31, 2008, the Constitutional Court of Colombia (the Court) handed down a decision (T-760/2008) that ordered a dramatic restructuring of the country’s health system [1]. The judgment came as the culmination of a wave of litigation to enforce the right to health, with tens of thousands of health rights cases before the Colombian courts each year [2]. Since 1992, the Court has staunchly up...

American legal realism was committed to examining legal reasoning in terms of the actual experiences of judges. Because the realist project sought to use social science tools to examine human nature, the contemporary rise of cognitive neuroscience provides an occasion for reexamining legal realism’s foundational critique of the law. Realism’s attempt to examine “the actual facts of judicial beh...