We use an agency model to analyze the impact of judicial review on the incentives of elected leaders to “posture” by enacting bold but ill-advised policies. We find that judicial review may exacerbate posturing by rescuing leaders from the consequences of unwise policies, but may also discourage posturing by alerting voters to unjustified government action. We further find that judges will defe...

Cross-cultural diversity in economic game behavior has been cited as evidence that humans do not possess psychological adaptations specialized for cooperation in collective actions (CAs). In this paper, it is argued that such adaptations may, in fact, exist and that their design may be illuminated by the appropriate kinds of cross-cultural data. To exemplify an aspect of cooperation that may no...

INTRODUCTION This report describes the extent to which 12 workplace aggression prevention and minimisation actions have been implemented in Australian clinical medical practice settings. METHODS Using a cross-sectional, self-report survey conducted as part of a national longitudinal study of the Australian medical workforce, differences in the proportions of medical clinicians reporting the i...

This study aimed to analyse live and stoppage time phases, their ratio, and action played on half and full court in college basketball games. Differences were assessed for the entire games and between halves. Moreover, differences of the live/stoppage time ratio were analysed between games and game-based conditioning drills. Ten games as well as fifteen defensive, fourteen offensive and six scr...

class members in the prior state court case. Plaintiffs’ amended complaint withdrew one Plaintiff, but added two, Jack and Joyce Franklin. If the Franklins lived on, leased, or owned their current Concord Community properties between January 1, 1990 and December 22, 2002, they too were class members unless they opted out. The Franklins' status in the class action, however, is ultimately irrelev...

In this paper, which was prepared to help set the stage at an interdisciplinary conference held at the University of Indiana (Bloomington) in March, I first briefly review what I take to be the key events and developments in the history of the study of judicial behavior in legal scholarship, with attention to corresponding developments in political science. I identify obstacles to cooperation i...

The sentencing decisions of trial judges are constrained by statutory limits imposed by legislatures. At the same time, judges in many states face periodic review, often by the electorate. We develop a model in which the effects of these features of a judge’s political landscape on judicial behavior interact. The model yields several intriguing results: First, if legislators care about the prop...

Increasing scholarly attention is being paid to women and judging. The literature now covers a wide field, only some of which can be referred to here: analysis of judicial appointments; the structure, practices and culture of the legal profession (Schultz and Shaw 2003; Resnik 1996); judicial decisions (including both the decisions themselves and their impact, or not, on women, see, e.g. Schnei...

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...

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...