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Judicial opinion

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


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Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: JudO, an OWL2 ontology library of legal knowledge that relies on the metadata contained in judicial documents, is introduced, which represents the interpretations performed by a judge while conducting legal reasoning towards the adjudication of a case.
Abstract: The article introduces JudO, an OWL2 ontology library of legal knowledge that relies on the metadata contained in judicial documents. JudO represents the interpretations performed by a judge while conducting legal reasoning towards the adjudication of a case. To the aim of this application, judicial interpretation is intended in the restricted sense of the acts of judicial subsumption performed by the judge when he considers a material instance (token in Searle's terminology), and assigns it to an abstract category (type). The ontology library is based on a theoretical model and on some specific patterns that exploit some new features introduced by OWL2. JudO provides meaningful legal semantics, while retaining a strong connection to source documents (fragments of legal texts). The application task is to enable detection and modeling of jurisprudence-related information directly from the text, and to perform shallow reasoning on the resulting knowledge base. The ontology library is also supposed to support a defeasible rule set for legal argumentation on the groundings of judicial decisions.

29 citations

Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: In this paper, the impact of judicial activism on public opinion by examining citizen evaluations of a state court system deeply involved in a highly political controversy is explored. But the analysis is guided by familiar hypotheses from the empirical analysis of public support for the United States Supreme Court.
Abstract: This research note explores the impact of judicial activism on public opinion by examining citizen evaluations of a state court system deeply involved in a highly political controversy. Data are derived from four surveys of New Jersey citizens conducted at different stages of the controversy. The note first appraises the prominence of the state supreme court and gauges the degree of public approval, and then it identifies and analyzes the correlates of the affective attitudes. The study is guided by familiar hypotheses from the empirical analysis of public support for the United States Supreme Court.

29 citations

Posted Content
TL;DR: In this paper, the authors examine the question of whether United States district court judges improve their skills at patent claim construction as a function of experience, including as a result of having their own cases reviewed by the Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit.
Abstract: This article examines the question of whether United States district court judges improve their skills at patent claim construction as a function of experience, including as a function of having their own cases reviewed by the Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit. In theory, higher courts teach doctrine to lower courts via judicial decisions, and lower courts learn from these decisions. This article tests the teaching-and-learning premise on the issue of claim construction in the realities of patent litigation. While others have shown that the Federal Circuit reverses a large percentage of lower court claim constructions, no one has analyzed whether judges with more claim construction appeal experience fare better on subsequent appeals. Surprisingly, the data do not reveal any evidence that district court judges learn from prior appeals of their rulings. There is no suggestion of a significant relationship between experience and performance. The lack of evidence that Federal Circuit review aids district court judges is disconcerting. The article explores three possible explanations for the lack of evidence: (1) the indeterminate nature of claim construction; (2) that district court judges are incapable of or not interested in learning how to perform claim construction; and (3) that the Federal Circuit decisions do a poor job of teaching district court judges how to construe claims. These results shed critical light on the functioning of the patent system. Moreover, the results are relevant to a broader understanding of the relationship between higher and lower courts in general.

29 citations

Journal ArticleDOI
Susan Bandes1
TL;DR: The judicial tendency to anecdotalize governmental misconduct - to view instances of misconduct as isolated rather than systemic - is examined in this paper. But the authors focus on the role of the courts' role in this acquiescence.
Abstract: This article is concerned, most generally, with the judicial tendency to anecdotalize governmental misconduct - to view instances of misconduct as isolated rather than systemic More specifically, it is concerned with the impact of this phenomenon in the context of systemic police brutality It argues that police brutality is permitted to flourish by a series of interlocking institutions that characterize brutal acts as isolated and anecdotal, and it focuses particularly on the courts' role in this acquiescence The courts permit and even implicitly condone police brutality through a number of substantive and procedural doctrines that fragment patterns of misconduct The article argues that although it is important to study each of these doctrines individually, the tendency to anecdotalize police misconduct has more basic explanations that transcend particular doctrinal devices Part I examines the phenomenon of police brutality, with particular attention to the ways in which patterns are masked Section A takes a detailed look at one pocket in which police brutality and even torture have long thrived: Chicago's Area Two Violent Crimes Unit Section B asks whether the story told about Area Two is itself anecdotal, or is representative of a larger pattern, and describes more generally the attributes of police brutality as practiced in the United States, with attention to, among others, the Louima and Diallo cases in New York Part II seeks to understand the pattern of fragmentation that characterizes the judicial reaction to police brutality Section A suggests that the literary notion of anecdote, with its concerns about irrelevant detail, the linkages among seemingly disparate acts, and the problem of judging representativeness, can help us think about the patterns of governmental misconduct and why they are so often ancedotalized It suggests that judicial decisions about what details are connected, relevant or representative are not merely mechanical, but are informed by cultural, social and political assumptions Section B posits several such assumptions that may lead judges to view patterns of governmental misconduct as a series of disconnected events These include: the assumption that the status quo is coherent and just; the use of selective empathy; the fear of destabilization and chaos; the need for individual stories of motive, fault and blame; reliance on the common law paradigm; and the preference for judicial insulation The article illustrates the effect of these assumptions in the police brutality context

29 citations


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Performance
Metrics
No. of papers in the topic in previous years
YearPapers
202314
202242
202196
2020160
2019174
2018176