“Being a good judge in this environment means unlearning what you learned in law school about what a judge is supposed to do. Fairness is doing things a federal judge would never do.”Active judging, where judges step away from the traditional, passive role to assist those without counsel, is...

The novel coronavirus disease (COVID) pandemic has challenged an array of democratic institutions in complex, unexpected and unprecedented ways. Little academic work, however, has considered the pandemic’s impact on Canada’s judicial institutions. This paper aims to fill that gap by...

The Italian Constitution expressly contemplates the possibility of a wrongful conviction, by stating that the law shall determine the conditions and forms regulating damages in case of judicial error. Therefore, it should come as no surprise that many provisions of the Italian Code of Criminal...

A central question in development economics is whether there are adequate checks and balances on the executive. This paper provides causal evidence on how increasing constraints on the executive, through the removal of Presidential discretion in judicial appointments, promotes the rule of law....

We believe that at a deeper level the independent judiciary is not only consistent with, but essential to, the interest-group theory of government. Part I of this paper explains our theory of the independent judiciary. Part II discusses several implications of the theory, relating to...

Judges play a crucial role in our adversary system, both inside and outside the courtroom. Yet, the past two decades have seen increased attention to the challenges facing the courts with the flood of unrepresented litigants in civil cases. The challenges impact the roles of each actor within...

Like Congress and other deliberative bodies, the Supreme Court decides its cases by majority vote. If at least five out of the nine justices come to an agreement, their view prevails. But why is that the case? Majority voting for the Court is not spelled out in the Constitution, a federal...

This study analyzes how authoritarian leaders use the judicial system to solve the principal-agent problem in the government hierarchy. We argue that autocrats recentralize court personnel to enhance the central government's monitoring power over local officials. We test this executive...

This encyclopedia entry offers an overview of access to justice in the field of human rights. While the concept of access to justice is difficult to grasp, the entry identifies two primary ways in which it intersects with human rights: On the one hand, access to justice relates to the...