We report a perception study in which judges attempted to label as deceptive or truthful the recorded interviews of the ColumbiaSRI-Colorado Corpus of deceptive speech. In general, judges performed very poorly at the task, scoring on average worse than chance. We use these results to contextualize ‘current best’ machine learning performance on this corpus. In addition, we report strong findings...

In a recent decision of the Indian Supreme Court, judges foreshadowed authorising separation of teenage conjoined twins where both would die if not separated but where the operation could save only one. The absence of medical information advising separation precluded such a decision in the case at hand. However, the case raises a number of difficult legal and ethical questions that judges would...

The objective of this study is to employ a hazard model to examine the determinants of retirement among Australia’s top judges using a unique dataset for the High Court data from 1904 to 2001. Our estimation results suggest that pension eligibility, whether the judge was an active participant in the Court’s work and the political persuasion of the appointing government are important predictors ...

Sure, these are of ten the whiz kids who dazzle judges and win big awards. But it could be you as well. And the benef its f rom sticking with some research theme f or a year or more go well beyond gaining the knowledge to potentially wow teachers and science f air judges. Teens who carry out long-term research projects also gain a lif e lesson in curiosity, discipline and resilience. These are ...

This article explores why national judges remain passive on EU legal integration by examining judges’ reasons for not requesting preliminary rulings from the European Court of Justice (ECJ). The combines insights social psychology and literature role courts in to formulate expectations regarding what type motives guide behaviours. Drawing interviews held with Croatian, Slovenian Swedish judges,...

I intuitively agree with Segal and Spaeth's conclusion that Supreme Court justices are guided in their decision-making by their personal beliefs and attitudes. For one thing, if jurists ideological beliefs were not important, the party of the president who nominated a justice would not matter, which seems clearly at odds with the facts. I also acknowledge the difficulties the authors face in at...

• Understanding to what extent judicial independence is adhered to in various jurisdictions requires a theoretical framework of what the principle entails. On a preliminary analysis, the principle can be said to require the following: judicial systems must be free, in fact and appearance, from any undue influence that might prevent judges from adjudicating legal disputes solely on the basis of ...

How do judicial elections affect the propensity of judges to write opinions that are understandable to the public? Drawing on a growing literature that analyzes the content of judicial opinions computationally, I examine the readability of all state supreme court search and seizure decisions from 2000-2010. I assess the hypothesis that, just as judicial elections increase judges’ propensities t...

We present an intelligent FAQ system for junior judges that intensively uses the ontology and allows a free text input for querying. We describe the use of legal ontologies as a basis to improve IT support for professional judges. As opposed to most legal ontologies designed so far, which are mostly based on dogmatic and normative knowledge, we emphasize the importance of professional knowledge...

* Chairman, National Environment Tribunal, Kenya. Former Director, UNEP. This paper draws from earlier papers on past colloquia in Kenya, two for High Court Judges (January and April 2006) and one for East Africa: the Court of Appeal Judges for Kenya, Tanzania and Supreme Court and Court of Appeal, Uganda. I acknowledge the research and other contributions of Judy Gitau of Kaniaru & Kaniaru Adv...