Judicial opinion

About: Judicial opinion is a research topic. Over the lifetime, 5300 publications have been published within this topic receiving 64803 citations.

Probing the Effects of Judicial Specialization

Abstract: Americans typically think of judges as generalists. For some people, this quality is highly desirable or even inherent in the role of judge.1 But in reality, the judiciary includes a good deal of specialization, and the extent of that specialization has increased over time. People within and outside the courts have given considerable attention to some aspects of that development, but they have not sufficiently considered the implications of the extent and growth of judicial specialization. In their article, Jeffrey Rachlinski, Chris Guthrie, and Andrew Wistrich address one important implication?the impact of specialization on the behavior of judges.2 Specifically, they consider how the specialization of most administrative law judges affects the ways they make choices. In this Response, I consider more broadly how specialization can affect judges' behavior as well as the task of ascertaining its effects. I argue that specialization can have powerful effects on judicial decisions through immersion of judges in specific fields of legal policy and judicial expertise and through the enhanced influence of political and legal interests in those fields. At present, understanding of those effects is limited. Because of the potential importance of those effects, more concerted efforts by scholars to identify them would have great value.

Predicting Judicial Decisions of Criminal Cases from Thai Supreme Court Using Bi-directional GRU with Attention Mechanism

Abstract: Predicting court judgement has gained growing attention over the past years. Prior attempts used traditional prediction techniques based on Bag of words (BoW), where the order of words is discarded, resulting in low accuracy. In this paper, we propose a prediction model of criminal cases from Thai Supreme Court using End-to-End Deep Learning Neural Networks. Our model imitates a process of legal interpretation, whereby recurrent neural networks read the fact from an input case and compare them against relevant legal provisions with the attention mechanism. The model's output shows if a person is guilty of a crime according to the fact and laws. After the performance test, we find that our model could yield the higher F1 than traditional text classification techniques including Naive Bayes and SVM. In addition, we innovate the open dataset called “Thai Supreme Court Cases (TSCC)” that was compiled from many decades of Thai Supreme Court criminal judgements. It features the text of fact expertly extracted from each judgement, textual provisions from Thai Criminal Code, and binary-format labels following the theoretical criminal law structure. This dataset is useful for achieving judgement predicting task together with emulating actual criminal case trial.

Judicial Lawmaking at the ad hoc Tribunals: The Creative Use of the Sources of International Law and "Adventurous Interpretation"

Abstract: The UN Security Council’s instruction that the ICTY should apply its Statute without legislating new international law was not realistic because it failed to take into account the underdeveloped nature of international criminal law. This article considers the ad hoc International Criminal Tribunals’ use of the sources of international law in making new law, drawing on Article 38 of the ICJ Statute. The article will focus on the use of customary international law, general principles and judicial decisions. In cases of gaps in the existing law, the Tribunals have made law by resorting to the purposive method of interpretation. The ICTY has justified controversial decisions by referring to the purpose of extending the protection of humanitarian law to areas that have previously been unaffected by humanitarian law. The article will consider instances of such lawmaking in the case law of the Tribunals and ask whether the interpretative methodology used by the judges was justifiable. * BA LLB (Cape Town), LLM (Humboldt), PhD (Leiden, Associate Professor, School of Law, University of Witwatersrand. http://www.zaoerv.de/ © 2010, Max-Planck-Institut fur auslandisches offentliches Recht und Volkerrecht

Running for Judge: The Rising Political, Financial, and Legal Stakes of Judicial Elections

Abstract: List of Tables List of Figures Acknowledgments1 The Study of Judicial ElectionsMatthew J. Streb2 First Amendment Limits on Regulating Judicial Campaigns Richard L. Hasen3 The Changing Tone of Judicial Election Campaigns as a Result of White Rachel P. Cau?eld4 The Dynamics of Campaign Spending in State Supreme Court Elections Chris W. Bonneau5 Interest Group Participation in Judicial Elections Deborah Goldberg6 Partisan Involvement in Partisan and Nonpartisan Trial Court ElectionsMatthew J. Streb7 Judicial Elections in the NewsBrian F. Schaffner and Jennifer Segal Diascro8 Voter Responses to High-Visibility Judicial Campaigns Lawrence Baum and David Klein9 Competition as Accountability in State Supreme Court Elections Melinda Gann Hall10 Judicial Selection Methods and Capital Punishment in the American StatesPaul Brace and Brent D. Boyea11 Judicial Reform and the Future of Judicial Elections Matthew J. Streb and Brian FrederickBibliographyAbout the Contributors Index

Impact: The Supreme Court in American Politics

Abstract: In this dissertation I seek to answer the question: when, how, and under what conditions does the Supreme Court make or influence policy and politics in the United States? In working to answer this question, I demonstrate that the Supreme Court has significantly more power and influence than scholars have typically given it credit for. I argue that the nature of the Court’s power is interpretive: it is the power to say what the law is. This power gives the Court the ability to make policy routinely, in every case that comes before it. Often the exercise of this policymaking power is mundane, but sometimes it is profound. By shifting focus away from compliance—the dominant focus in the empirical literature on Court power—and towards interpretation, I significantly extend the range of cases and the scope of outcomes of decisions covered by the theory of power. Finally, this theory of power allows me to develop a theory of judicial impact. I contend that judicial impact has two key sources: judicial power, and indirect judicial influence, by which I mean any action which is attributable to an exercise of judicial power, but which is not a direct outcome of any power relationship. For example, political elites respond to Court decisions, other institutions rationally anticipate Court action, and judicial decisions can incentivize or discourage activism, lobbying, legislation, litigation, and more. In short, this points to the utility of expanding the study of judicial impact to encompass all policy-relevant outcomes of judicial action, and the theory offered here provides an anchor for this approach as well as a framework for systematizing a wide range of different impacts. I go on to show that the Court’s indirect influence can be seen in that its decisions routinely affect media coverage of the issues on which it speaks, as well the policymaking agendas of the president and the political parties. In other words, I show that the Court indirectly influences policy in a number of ways, one of which is to alter the political agenda of the public and of other policymaking institutions in the United States. IMPACT: THE SUPREME COURT IN AMERICAN POLITICS by Logan Strother B.A., Missouri University of Science & Technology, 2010 M.A., Southern Illinois University, 2012 M.A., Syracuse University, 2013 Dissertation Submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in Political Science Syracuse University June 2017 Copyright © Logan Strother 2017 All Rights Reserved