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Journal ArticleDOI

The Supreme Court of Canada and Strategic Decision Making: Examining Justices’ Voting Patterns during Periods of Institutional Change

Susan W. Johnson
- 01 Jun 2012 - 
- Vol. 42, Iss: 2, pp 236-256
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TLDR
The authors examined the voting behavior of justices of the Supreme Court of Canada during two important periods of institutional change: the end of appeals to the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council (JCPC) and the adoption of the Charter of Rights and Freedoms.
Abstract
This article examines the voting behavior of justices of the Supreme Court of Canada during two important periods of institutional change: the end of appeals to the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council (JCPC) and the adoption of the Charter of Rights and Freedoms. I argue that these changes affected the justices' voting patterns in systematic ways. My assertion is that the end of appeals to the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council removes a constraint on Supreme Court decision-making, which had led to strategic voting by the justices in the period during which the JCPC could examine and reverse the Supreme Court's decisions. For the Charter of Rights, I assert that its existence as a legal document served as a constraint for conservative justices on the Court in the period immediately following its passage. Drawing on the universe of decisions of the Supreme Court of Canada from 1945 to 2005 in criminal, tax, and tort cases, I use Baum's (1988, 1989) method of examining policy change on the Supreme ...

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Citations
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Journal ArticleDOI

Towards Juristocracy: The Origins and Consequences of the New Constitutionalism

TL;DR: Hirschl as discussed by the authors considers recent transfers of power to judiciaries to be unprecedented in their breadth and scope, features of what the author describes as "the new constitutionalism".

Extraterritorial Courts and States: Learning from the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council

TL;DR: In this article, the authors examine the first and best example of an extraterritorial court, namely the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council (JCPC), and explore the factors influencing the decision to accede to an international court and why some states subsequently opt to sever ties.
References
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Book

The Supreme Court and the Attitudinal Model Revisited

TL;DR: In this article, two leading scholars of the US Supreme Court and its policy making, systematically present and validates the use of the attitudinal model to explain and predict Supreme Court decision making.
Book

The Supreme Court and the Attitudinal Model

TL;DR: A political history of the Supreme Court can be found in this paper, where the authors present a model of decision-making in the court and the decision-on-the-merits process.
Journal ArticleDOI

Ideological Values and the Votes of U.S. Supreme Court Justices

TL;DR: Using content analytic techniques, this paper derived independent and reliable measures of the values of all Supreme Court justices from Earl Warren to Anthony Kennedy, providing strong support for the attitudinal model.
Book

The Rights Revolution: Lawyers, Activists, and Supreme Courts in Comparative Perspective

TL;DR: This paper argued that far from being the fruit of an activist judiciary, the ascendency of civil rights and liberties has rested on the democratization of access to the courts -the influence of advocacy groups, the establishment of governmental enforcement agencies, the growth of financial and legal resources for ordinary citizens, and the strategic planning of grass roots organizations.
Book

Towards Juristocracy: The Origins and Consequences of the New Constitutionalism

TL;DR: In countries and supranational entities around the globe, constitutional reform has transferred an unprecedented amount of power from representative institutions to judiciaries as discussed by the authors, and the constitutionalization of rights and the establishment of judicial review are widely believed to have benevolent and progressive origins.