A large body of empirical evidence demonstrates that judicial review of agency action is highly politicized, in the sense that Republican appointees are significantly more likely to invalidate liberal agency decisions than conservative ones, while Democratic appointees are significantly more likely to invalidate conservative agency decisions than liberal ones. These results hold for both (a) ju...

Judges are afforded considerable discretion in decision-making. Through their exercise of discretion, judges construct society's notion of crime and justice. This study examined 61 lay judges' bail decision-making in the English criminal justice system. The law states that in particular cases decisions to grant bail or remand in custody should be based on the risk of a defendant absconding, off...

In this Article, Professor Baron challenges the position taken recently by Dr. Arnold Relman in this journal that the 1977 Saikewicz decision of the Supreme Judicial Court of Massachusetts was incorrect in calling for routine judicial resolution of decisions whether to provide life-prolonging treatment to terminally ill incompetent patients. First, Professor Baron argues that Dr. Relman's posit...

This article shows that judicial review has a democratic justification, although it is not necessary for democratic government and its virtues are controversial and often speculative. Against critics like Waldron and Bellamy, it shows that judges, no less than legislators, can embody democratic forms of representation, accountability and participation. Hence, judicial review is not undemocratic...

This paper discusses an attribution problem that is particularly critical for argumentation mining in judicial decisions, and the development of a legal discourse model as an important component of any solution to that problem. Attribution in this context is the problem of determining who believes a stated proposition to be true. This is a particularly difficult problem for developing natural l...

Most scholars focus on whether the U.S. Sentencing Guidelines effectively constrain judges or result in disparate decisions based on a court’s or defendant’s location. With few exceptions, studies of the effect of judicial attributes on federal-district-court-sentencing cases have been stymied by the United States Sentencing Commission’s refusal to release judges’ names in their databases of se...

M ost economic theory presumes—often implicitly—a system of law and adjudication. After all, institutions like property, contract, and government regulation typically entail mechanisms for law-creation and lawapplication, which usually (though perhaps not inevitably) imply some kind of judicial system (Posner, 2008, pp. 5–6). Because judges are often responsible for interpreting and enforcing t...

This paper explores three competing accounts of judicial review by comparing the enacting and invalidating coalitions for each of the fifty-three federal statutes struck down by the Supreme Court during its 1981 through 2005 terms. When a Republican judicial coalition invalidates a Democratic statute, the Court’s decision is consistent with a partisan account, and when a conservative judicial c...

Accuracy and due process perspectives were used to extend policycapturing research concerning employment discrimination case law. TWo-hundred ninety-five usable U.S. Circuit Court decisions concerning performance appraisal were located from 1980-1995. In both chisquare and multivariate LOGIT analyses, decisions were explained by: use of job analysis, provision of written instructions, employee ...

A significant majority of the world’s constitutional courts publicize their decisions through direct contact with the national media. This interest in public information is puzzling in so far as constitutional judges are not directly accountable to voters. I argue that the promotion of case results is consistent with a theory of judicial behavior in which public support for courts can undermine...