Laura P. Moyer

De Facto Judicial Independence and Physical Integrity Rights

Economists, political scientists, and legal scholars have argued that independent judiciaries have an important role to play in promoting economic development and protecting property rights. We argue that judicial independence can also have a positive impact on the protection of human rights. To assess the human rights impact of a de facto independent judiciary, we also argue that scholars must account for the potential of endogeneity between judicial independence and protection of human rights. We examine whether greater de facto independence improves government respect for citizens’ physical integrity rights, using a comprehensive dataset of 193 countries from 1981 to 2010. Employing an instrumental variables approach to control for endogeneity, we find strong support for the argument that greater levels of de facto judicial independence improve government respect for physical integrity rights. These findings are robust to changes in measurement, estimation techniques, and model specification. Failing to account for endogeneity will tend to overemphasize the ability of completely independent courts to improve government respect for physical integrity rights.

The Value of Precedent: Appellate Briefs and Judicial Opinions in the U.S. Courts of Appeals

This study of appellate advocacy examines factors that affect judicial treatment of precedents identified in litigant briefs. Although we find some attorney and party characteristics influence whether a court addresses precedent cited by a party, legal resources are not as influential in the courts adoption of a partys use of a precedent. At times, ideological congruence between the circuit panel and the litigant increases the likelihood that the courts opinion will use a precedent in the same way as presented by the litigants. Concerning attorney experience, when their clients ultimately win the case, attorneys with no experience before the circuit are less likely to see the court use litigant-cited precedents in a similar way to the party brief. Even when their clients lose, experienced attorneys are more likely to see the courts opinion address the precedents the attorneys have raised positively. This suggests that attorney experience has some influence in shaping legal policy, regardless of whether the litigant wins or loses.

Diversity, Deliberation, and Judicial Opinion Writing

Underlying scholarly interest in diversity is the premise that a representative body contributes to robust decision-making processes. Using an innovative measure of opinion content, we examine this premise by analyzing deliberative outputs in the US courts of appeals (1997–2002). While the presence of a single female or minority did not affect the attention to issues in the majority opinion, panels composed of a majority of women or minorities produced opinions with significantly more points of law compared to panels with three Caucasian males.

Being Part of the “Home Team”: Perceptions of Professional Interactions with Outsider Attorneys

Understanding how attorneys’ perceptions of “insider” and “outsider” status affect negotiations is of both theoretical and practical importance for understanding the judicial system. We utilize a comprehensive survey of attorneys from one state to explore views of trustworthiness and negotiations. Overall, as attorneys become more embedded in their in-group, they increasingly report lower trust levels and less effective negotiations with outsiders. These relationships do vary somewhat by the scope and location of the attorney’s practice. Our findings provide insight into one possible causal mechanism underlying the “repeat player” advantage; they also suggest new directions for research on case outcomes.

Reflections: The First Twenty-five Volumes of the Justice System Journal

he year 2004 marks the twenty-fifth volume of Justice System Journal and with this issue more than a quarter of a century of publications will be complete. This is a milestone for the Journal; for its publisher, the National Center for State Courts (NCSC); and for the Institute for Court Management, which founded the Journal and now operates under NCSC auspices. At this milestone, it is fair to say that the Justice System Journal has worked to extend the many missions of the National Center for State Courts and the Institute for Court Management and to bridge the divide between practitioners and scholars of judicial administration and court management, both broadly understood. The strength of JSJ lies in its affiliation with the Institute for Court Management and the National Center for State Courts, the breadth of expertise of its contributing authors and editorial board, and the quality of its publications. Over the Journal’s history, articles have ranged from sophisticated quantitative analyses to prescriptive management essays and from qualitative case studies to traditional legal analyses. As noted in the “Letter from the Editor,” this last issue of volume 25 provides a retrospective of the Journal, and this article offers an overview of its publication history. Here, attention will be directed to the Journal’s history and to the contributions it has made in four areas: court management, special courts, comparative and interactive analyses, and civil and criminal case processing and policy. In this summary presentation, attention will not be directed to every single article, note, or review published in JSJ’s first twenty-five volumes. Before this summary, however, it is important to note that Justice System Journal has provided reports and analyses of court cases thought to be of interest to court administrators. Most of these were reports of individual cases, prepared by the Journal’s Legal Notes editors, although a few were contributed by others. Some Legal Notes even encompassed more than one case in an essay on a particular topic. These Legal Notes have covered a wide range of topics, including delay in processing cases, judges’ recusal from cases, personnel issues, the question of religious symbols in courthouses, the powers of magistrate judges, and judges’ salaries. Most were reports of federal cases, but many of the situations giving rise to those federal cases arose in state courts. It is also important to note that in the Journal book reviews or essays have been periodically published. These reviews and essays have touched on a variety of topics of potential interest to judges and court administrators and have been designed to call attention to pertinent publications in court management, broadly understood. The T

The rise of judicial management in the U.S. district court, southern district of Texas, 1955-2000, By Steven Harmon Wilson.

n The Rise of Judicial Management, part of Studies in the Legal History of the South, historian Steven Harmon Wilson sets his sights on the often-understudied federal district courts and attempts to position his research on the Southern District of Texas at the intersection of legal history and social scientific analysis. These are certainly laudable goals; even a cursory glance at the political science and history literature reveals both a bias toward the higher federal courts and little or no cross-disciplinary communication, with frequent duplication of efforts. However, I begin with a quick forewarning to potential readers: The Rise of Judicial Management is first and foremost a narrative, historical account of the judges and cases before the courts of the Southern District of Texas that offers little in the way of critical analysis, social scientific evidence, or generalizable assertions on judicial management. That said, readers of Justice System Journal may best appreciate the book as a case study on the difficulties of judicial prioritization and implementation. Wilson argues in his introduction that changes in the quantity and substance of litigation from 1955 to 2000, coupled with federal directives, necessarily changed the operation of the Southern District court and led to the rise of judicial management. Wilson distinguishes among three varieties of judicial management: docket management (maintaining efficient and orderly caseflow), case management (guiding complex litigation through the courts), and public-law litigation (using judicial power outside the courtroom to achieve broad social reform). Wilson gives the most attention to the third of these, public-law litigation, and relies upon the definition of litigation coined by Abram Chayes in which the judge is both “the creator and manager of complex forms of ongoing relief, which have widespread effects on persons not before the court and require the judge’s continuing involvement in administration and implementation” (p. 7). The eight chapters are grouped chronologically and by subject matter. This organizing strategy probably does the least justice to the two chapters dealing with public-school desegregation and integration efforts, separating them by 140 pages. Chapter 1 focuses upon challenges in the first decade after Brown v. Board of Education (1954), while chapter 5 picks up the story in the late 1960s and early 1970s. The judicial responses to segregation in the Southern District can be broadly characterized as incremental in nature, and as increasingly less tolerant of the school districts’ proclivity to stall. Wilson provides a good description of judges’ tactics in