According to popular wisdom, judicial independence and the rule of law are essential features of modern democracy. Drawing on the growing comparative literature on courts, we unpack this claim by focusing on two broad questions: How does the type of political regime affect judicial independence?...

What is genocide? Can a State be held judicially accountable for its commission? What affirmative obligations do States have to prevent genocide? The International Court of Justice (ICJ) offered new answers to these perennial questions on February 26 when it held in the Application of the...

The idea of the World Court of Human Rights was first envisioned in 1947 along with other institutions designed to create a system capable of the worldwide protection of individual human rights. The focus of the present study is to determine key issues of the prospective establishment of the...

Over 10 years ago, Feld and Voigt (2003) introduced the first indicator for objectively meas-uring the actual independence of the judiciary and demonstrated its utility in a large cross-section of countries. The indicator has been widely used, but also criticized. This paper pre-sents more...