Judicial Posts Research Articles

Filling the Red State Federal Judicial Vacancies

District vacancies without nominees that plague red jurisdictions deserve emphasis in this Essay for several reasons. First, there are myriad district court jurists who trigger greater numbers of empty posts when they assume senior status, retire, or die, which triggers more issues. Legislators have created 677 active trial court positions, which dwarf the 179 active court of appeals judicial posts. The trial courts are tribunals of last resort for most cases; their numerous jurists are the only court members that many litigants encounter, and significantly more district court openings lack nominees. In contrast, appellate courts explicitly articulate considerable policy, include multiple states, and enunciate precedent, which strictly binds trial level judges in each circuit’s purview. Vacancies’ substantial quantity and protracted character impose serious complications. Extensive openings increase pressure on all jurists, court staff, and litigants by prolonging resolution. Litigants who file civil suits particularly feel the pressure of judicial vacancies. The prevalence and duration of many red state trial court vacancies without nominees essentially inflict adverse effects that may prevent judges from satisfying their duties to ensure expeditious, inexpensive, and equitable disposition under Federal Rule of Civil Procedure 1. Accordingly, that issue requires scrutiny, which this Essay undertakes.

Retired Judges and Post-Retirement Foreign Judicial Posts

Retired Judges and Post-Retirement Foreign Judicial Posts

Magistrates’ Travelling Libraries: The Circulation of Normative Knowledge in the Portuguese Empire of the Late 18th Century

The pluricontinental Portuguese judicial administration was characterized by intensive movement of personnel around and between its dominions, forming a global network of rotating judicial posts. Along with these individuals, their books circulated, too. The present study focuses on the lists of books of eleven magistrates appointed to judicial posts in a range of locations throughout Portuguese America between 1799 and 1807. Censorship sources allow us to identify the books chosen by these itinerant magistrates as being indispensable for the exercise of their judicial function. In view of the cost of shipping, the books’ weight and, above all, the temporary character of the functionaries’ posts, judges established travelling libraries, portable collections of essential professional books. Identifying the books selected by judges as the work tools for their overseas judicial activities provides a good idea of the legal literature available in the final years of the Portuguese Ancien Régime. Finally, this investigation sheds light on how – and what kind of – normative information circulated in Portugal’s colonies along with these agents of the Crown.

Reevaluating ‘countermeasure from below’: evidences from judicial personnel reforms in China

ABSTRACTIn the past few years, China has made a drastic switch to a more centralized approach to institutional change, thus vastly reducing the decades-old problem of local non-compliance. Using the recent judicial personnel reforms (员额制改革) as a case study, this paper examines the functioning of this new top-down model. Based on field research, the paper finds that the reforms have drastically reduced judge headcounts, placing tremendous burden on those remaining. In addition, they have made it much harder for new recruits to rise to the rank of judge, forcing them to remain as ‘judicial assistants’ who are not allowed to adjudicate cases independently. These changes have driven many judges to resign and have significantly diminished the appeal of judicial posts to new talent, especially in developed regions where caseloads are heavier and alternative career options more lucrative. Furthermore, such problems have continued to plague the judiciary despite long-standing widespread acknowledgment of them within and outside the judiciary. These developments highlight a critical disadvantage of the new top-down approach: unlike the previous decentralized system, under which powerful local actors could often de facto reject institutional changes they deemed flawed or unsuitable to local circumstances, the new centralized approach provides little effective check against design defects in the center’s reforms.

Enhancing Our Justice System

Enhancing Our Justice System1 Richard Humphreys The need for court hearings within a reasonable time I am glad to have the opportunity to make some purely personal remarks as an individual ordinary judge of the High Court on how justice in our country can be improved. Ireland takes great pride in being a founder member of the Council of Europe and a leading supporter of its international standards. The first sentence of Article 6 of the European Convention on Human Rights provides that: ‘In the determination of his civil rights and obligations or of any criminal charge against him, everyone is entitled to a fair and public hearing within a reasonable time by an independent and impartial tribunal established by law’. There are a great many concepts compressed into that one sentence but I want to focus on just one, the right to a hearing ‘within a reasonable time’. As the adage has it, justice delayed is justice denied. But a hearing within a reasonable time is only possible if there are enough judges, relative to the amount of litigation being undertaken, to allow capacity in the system to deal with all cases and appeals promptly. While the temptation may sometimes be to blame judges and lawyers for all delays in the system, there needs to be a raised awareness of the fact that any given judge or court can only do so much. There is a wider systemic issue: the need for the Oireachtas to provide adequate staffing levels for the court system, both in terms of judicial posts and in terms of support staff. Article 36 of the Constitution provides that the number of judges is set by the Oireachtas and not by the judges themselves. One has to respectfully ask whether Ireland is living up to the requirement of having enough judges to allow all hearings to take place within a reasonable time? Unfortunately I have to suggest not.2 How does Ireland compare internationally? There are at present 163 judges to cover a population of 4.8 million people, or only thirty-four judges per million people. That puts Ireland firmly in the bottom layer of the international league table and rock bottom of the Studies • volume 107 • number 425 52 European league table. We do somewhat better than Ethiopia or Zimbabwe and marginally better than Saudi Arabia, but we are massively behind the developed world. The excellent EU Justice Scoreboard published by the European Commission in April 20173 makes for some thoughtful reading. Ireland does well on some scores, such as the extent to which judgments are published online.4 Our scores are generally poor in terms of the imbalance between incoming new cases and those processed in the course of a calendar year, suggestive of increasing backlogs.5 In terms of first-instance processing of cases, that aspect is a cause for concern insofar as it relates to public law litigation, but in the private law area the issue might require further study as, given that we have a party-led system of civil litigation rather than a judge-led system, it may be that a considerable number of those backlogged cases are being resolved or are withering on the vine without ever coming back to court to be recorded as such. Ireland is unfortunately not represented in other statistical tables seeking to measure length of proceedings, on the grounds that no data was provided. Exact comparisons with civil law systems may be difficult to draw in any event due to the tradition of oral evidence and oral advocacy which contrasts with the more paper-based systems in some continental countries. On the crucial issue of the number of judges per head of population,6 Ireland is not just at the bottom of the league (apart from the UK), but massively so, by some multiples of other EU countries. The European Commission’s laconic comment on their statistical table is that ‘Adequate human resources are essential for the quality of a justice system’.7 The UK is a special case, because ninety per cent of criminal business takes place in the magistrates’ courts,8 which are generally populated by lay persons. In Ireland that...

Variations on Ballot Format in Low-Information Elections

A common problem with studying the impact of ballot formats is the inability to test them in real world circumstances, due to the inability to vary election methods within states each year. This study examines the effect of ballot format on low information judicial elections. The pool of subjects consisted of over 550 undergraduate students enrolled in introductory American Government classes. Each subject was given an information sheet to simulate the usually available information about each candidate, and then asked to complete one of three randomly distributed ballots. Each ballot contained a race for President, U.S. Senate, and two hypothetical judicial posts. The three ballot formats given to the subjects included a straight ticket format, partisan format without the straight ticket option, and a non-partisan format. The results help to better identify the impact of alternative ballot formats on voter decision.

Voters and Judges: How the Texas Public Chooses High Court Judges

Judicial scholars have not seriously studied Texas' statewide partisan judicial system for nearly two decades. For most ofits history as a state Texas was a one-party Democratic state, but then moved through a short transitional stage of two-party competition, and is currently a one-party Republican state. In statewide judicial elections, 2004 through 2012, Republicans now easily win all the state's judicial posts, and only partisanship helps to explain vote outcomes in general elections. In the occasional Republican primaries incumbency and the number of challengers are both important. Truly competitive partisan elections do not now exist in Texas, and are exceedingly rare in other states.

Reflections on International Judges and Their Decision-making: A Review Essay on Daniel Terris et al. (eds), The International Judge

In reviewing this valuable book, some reflections were given concerning nominations of candidates for judicial posts, as well as on moral integrity of particular judges in the proceedings before the International Court of Justice on South West Africa (Namibia) between 1950 and 1971. Paradoxically, the controversial Judgment of 1966 had some salutary effects on further development of rules of general international law. 1. At the time when the author of this essay was a student of law in Sarajevo, between 1953 and 1957, only one fully established and universally recognized international forum of jurisdiction existed. This was the International Court of Justice (ICJ), one of the six principal organs of the UN and its principal judicial organ. At that same time, the Court of Justice of the European Coal and Steel Community was established in Luxemburg, and the Commission on behalf of the European Convention on Human Rights also commenced its activities in Strasbourg. 2. Nobody was certain of the future of the entire world during this difficult period. The war in Korea had just ended, happily without bombing China and the “enemy”-armed forces in North Korea with nuclear weapons. After this, there occurred

Commentary on “Picking Federal Judges: A Note on Policy and Partisan Selection Agendas”

The news that Federal Judges, which I co-authored with Virginia Hettinger and Todd Peppers, was one of the frequently cited articles published in Political Research Quarterly came as a surprise. While we, of course, thought the article made a significant contribution and were pleased that the reviewers and editor agreed, it seemed an unlikely prospect to win a competition for citations. After all, the article appeared under the designation of a research note, and the focus was on an issue central to a subfield but not to the discipline at large. How then can the scholarly attention given to Federal Judges be explained? The impact of the article, I think, can be attributed in some part to external political and intellectual forces. While political science research sometimes seems impervious to current political debates, the controversy surrounding judicial appointments in the Bush administration increased scholarly interest in judicial selection. Likewise, the publication of Sheldon Goldman's (1997) seminal Picking Federal Judges: Lower Court Selection from Roosevelt through Reagan contributed to increased scholarly attention to selection of lower federal court judges. The citation count of our article undoubtedly benefited from the resulting increase in publications to which it was relevant However, the benefit of a rising tide of scholarly interest in judicial selection is not sufficient to place our article among the select category of most cited. As the analysis below indicates, credit for that status appears to be attributable largely to the methodological contribution of the article. In the following essay, I will describe that contribution and survey the reactions of citing authors. The recognition that lower federal courts are important makers generated two important and vigorous research programs among judicial scholars: One focused on the process of selecting judges and one focused on the factors influencing their decisions. While these research programs were individually fruitful, few studies prior to our Federal Judges had attempted to explore the linkage between the politics and process of selection and the decisions of judges (exceptions were Rowland and Carp 1996; Rowland, Carp, and Stidham 1984; Songer 1982). The principal hindrance to that inquiry was the reliance of scholars on the party of the appointing president as the measure of judicial preferences for lower federal court judges. The party of the appointing president has consistently been linked to judicial behavior, with judges appointed by Democratic presidents more liberal in their decision making than those appointed by Republican presidents. While this result supports the inference that the party that controls the presidency matters in the selection process, it does not tell us how it matters. The problem is one of behavioral equivalency. All three of the causal mechanisms elaborated in Goldman's (1997) selection agendas could result in the judges appointed by Democratic presidents being more liberal than those appointed by Republican presidents. First, Democratic presidents are more liberal than their Republican counterparts, and each may nominate candidates with preferences close to their own (Goldman's policy agenda). Second, Democratic political activists are more liberal than Republican activists, and presidents may simply reward activist members of their party with judicial posts (Goldman's partisan agenda). Third, presidents may reward their friends with judicial appointments (Goldman's personal agenda), and with few exceptions, those friends will also be party activists. Thus, employing the party of the appointing president to measure judicial preferences presents a roadblock to assessing these alternative selection strategies.1 In addition to the problem of behavioral equivalence, the party of the appointing president is, at best, a poor proxy for judicial preferences. …

Codicia y bien público: los ministros de la Audiencia en la Lima seiscentista

The Administration agent was a complex figure in Colonial Peru. This article aims to discuss that complexity, focusing its analysis on the Ministers of Lima’s Audiencia during the Seventeenth century. The concepts of greed (codicia) and public good (bien publico) will be considered in that context, posing some ideas concerning the peculiar way of «selling» judicial posts, known as beneficio. The activities of some of the Audiencia’s Ministers in Lima will be discussed, trying to offer more references on their role in the viceregal society, as well as on their contemporaries’ perception regarding them.

Ibn Khaldun on Economic Transformation

A number of Arab countries have been exposed to structural adjustment programs. Under the guidance of the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund, these programs are aimed at making various kinds of Arab socialist and mixed-economy regimes more “market-friendly,” a policy that started in the 1950s and 1960s in countries like Algeria, Tunisia, Syria, and Egypt. Considering the mounting social tension that results from continuing population growth, urban agglomeration, and unemployment, it would be naive to expect—with Fukuyama—an “end of history” as most countries try to adopt market regimes and to strengthen civil society and parliamentary democracy. As Ibn Khaldun (1332–1406) well knew, economic and social change is a never-ending process. In the search for viable and sustainable strategies it may be stimulating to consider the insights of this great scholar of the Arab world who wrote 600 years ago.IBN KHALDUN'S SOCIAL SYSTEMS THEORYIbn Khaldun was born in Tunis into an influential clan of South Arabian origin with substantial influence in Islamic Spain and, after the fall of Seville in 1248, in north-western Africa. He was exposed to the turmoils of his time. He held his first position in 1352 at the court at Tunis at the age of 20 and then went on to high political, administrative, diplomatic, and judicial posts in the service of various rulers in the Maghrib, Spain, and Egypt.

Some General Characteristics of Nonpartisan Elections

Out of the middle-class businessman's “Efficiency and Economy Movement” that reached full strength in the second decade of the twentieth century came a series of innovations designed to place government “on a business basis” and to weaken the power of the political parties. The movement was inspired both by the example of the success of the corporate structure in trade and industry and by revulsion against the low standards of morality to be found in many sectors of political party activity around the turn of the century. The contemporary brand of politician had recently been exposed by the “muck-rakers” and the prestige of the parties had reached a very low level.Of the numerous ideas and mechanisms adopted as a result of the reform movement, one of the most unusual was that of election without party designation. Early in the twentieth century, under the theory that judges are neutral referees, not political officers, and that political activities should therefore be discouraged in the choosing of them, many communities initiated “nonpartisan” elections (the term that is usually applied) in the balloting for judicial posts.