Trial court judges play a crucial role in the administration of justice for both criminal and civil matters. Although psychologists have studied juries for many decades they have given relatively little attention to judges. Recent writings, however, suggest increasing interest in the psychology of judicial decision making. This essay reviews several selected topics where judicial discretion app...

With a Member State’s accession to the EU, national judges acquire new powers as well responsibilities. National ‘juges communautaire de droit commun’ are expected uphold principle of EU law supremacy; interpret in conformity with law; set aside provisions incompatible rules; when required, apply ex officio; and send preliminary question CJEU CJEU’s answers needed for resolution domestic legal ...

Two studies examined developmental differences in how children weigh capability and objectivity when evaluating potential judges. In Study 1, 84 6- to 12-year-olds and adults were told stories about pairs of judges that varied in capability (i.e., perceptual capacity) and objectivity (i.e., the relationship to a contestant) and were asked to predict which judge would be more accurate. Participa...

Federal appellate judges cite cases by sister circuits. Why is that? Common wisdom holds that judges look to out-of-circuit cases for credible legal arguments -as persuasive precedent. But hard-core adherents of the attitudinal model (Segal and Spaeth 2002) – and certain cynical realists and critical legal studies scholars – might argue that judges decide in accordance with their policy or poli...

MuayThai is a combat sport with a growing international profile but limited research conducted into judging practices and processes. Problems with judging of other subjectively judged combat sports have caused controversy at major international tournaments that have resulted in changes to scoring methods. Nationalistic bias has been central to these problems and has been identified across a ran...

The importance of the issue of the agreement (or disagreement) between relevance judges is increasing, since new kinds of relevance judgment expression are being used (to the classical dichotomous one, various researches have added scalar, weighted, and orders of various kind) and new media are being introduced (it is far quicker to judge the relevance of an image than a text, and thus the huma...

Past research suggests federal judges confront incentives that undermine the speed and quality with which they resolve cases when leisure interests are particularly strong. Alternatively, the selection process for federal judges, which seeks to identify intrinsically motivated individuals, as well as judges’ own desire for prestige—commonly tied to the quality of their work—may considerably mit...