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How does the Supreme Court choose among cases to grant cert? In the context of a model that considers a strategic Supreme Court, a continuum of rule-following lower courts, a set of cases available for revision, and a distribution of future lower court cases, we show that the Court grants cert to the case that will most significantly shape future lower court case outcomes in the direction that the Court prefers. That is, the Court grants cert to the case with maximum salience. If the Court is rather liberal (conservative) then the most salient case is the one that moves the discretionary range of the legal standard as far left (right) as possible. But if the Court is moderate, then the most salient case will be a function of the skewedness of the distribution of ideologies of the lower courts and the likelihood that future cases will fall within the part of the discretionary range that is adjusted if the case is granted cert. Variations take place when the ideology of the Court is moderately liberal, moderately conservative or fully moderate. Extensions of the model allow us to identify the sensitivity of the results to the number of petitions for revision; the variety of legal topics covered by the petitions; and anticipation of whether the Court will confirm or reverse.

The prospects for Artificial Intelligence (AI) to impact the development of Delaware corporate law are at once over- and under-stated. As a general matter, claims to the effect that AI systems might ultimately displace human directors not only exaggerate the foreseeable technological potential of these systems, but also tend to ignore doctrinal and institutional impediments intrinsic to Delaware's competitive model – notably, heavy reliance on nuanced and context-specific applications of the fiduciary duty of loyalty by a true court of equity. At the same time, however, there are specific applications of AI systems that might not merely be accommodated by Delaware corporate law, but perhaps eventually required. Such an outcome would appear most plausible in the oversight context, where fiduciary loyalty has been interpreted to require good faith effort to adopt a reasonable compliance monitoring system, an approach driven by an implicit cost-benefit analysis that could lean decisively in favor of AI-based approaches in the foreseeable future. This article discusses the prospects for AI to impact Delaware corporate law in both general and specific respects and evaluates their significance. Section II describes the current state of the technology and argues that AI systems are unlikely to develop to the point that they could displace the full range of functions performed by human boards in the foreseeable future. Section III, then, argues that even if the technology were to achieve more impressive results in the near-term than I anticipate, acceptance of non-human directors would likely be blunted by doctrinal and institutional structures that place equity at the very heart of Delaware corporate law. Section IV, however, suggests that there are nevertheless discrete areas within Delaware corporate law where reliance by human directors upon AI systems for assistance in board decision-making might not merely be accommodated, but eventually required. This appears particularly plausible in the oversight context, where fiduciary loyalty has become intrinsically linked with adoption of compliance monitoring systems that are themselves increasingly likely to incorporate AI technologies. Section V briefly concludes.

“The court and the public” argues that a judge’s awareness of public opinion is not only inevitable, but also necessary. Can the Court also influence the public? The long tenures of the justices do not seem to affect the equilibrium in which the Court and the public exist. Public polls show some approval for the Supreme Court in general, rather than its specific actions. However, famously contentious cases such as Roe v. Wade reveal the intersection of public opinion and Court judgment, showing what happens when the Court feels its legitimacy is threatened. Has the Court aligned itself with public opinion over time?

A very small percentage of cases reach the Supreme Court. “The Court at Work” explains that even if a case meets all the criteria, the justices are still at liberty to refuse it. The Court has navigated debates about the separation of powers and conflicting approaches to interpretations of the statutes. The growth of the administrative state means that the Court is now more often tasked with determining whether administrative agencies are carrying out their duties correctly. What do cases and controversies mean to the Supreme Court? Why are these terms important, and how have the Court’s interpretations of them changed over time?

This Article is the first to examine the behavior of judges and their law clerks (officially entitled référendaires) at the Court of Justice of the European Union. It identifies a number of serious issues affecting Court performance. First, the Article finds that the Court's high judicial salaries and lack of procedural safe-guards for EU judicial appointments attract political appointees. As a consequence, some judges who are selected are not compe-tent to perform their duties and are dominated by their référen-daires. Moreover, the high turnover rate of EU judges hampers their productivity and increases their dependence on the référen-daires. Using a sample of data hand-collected from LinkedIn, the Article demonstrates that référendaires are drawn from a rela-tively closed social network. There is no open platform for re-cruiting référendaires, and the requirement of French as the working language significantly limits the pool of eligible candi-dates. The inefficiency of the référendaire labor market results in less competition, leading many référendaires to stay longer at the Court. The revolving door between the Court and the European Commission raises serious conflict issues, as the Commission is able to exert influence on the Court from the inside and gain a comparative advantage in litigation. In addition, the Court’s practice of issuing a single, collegial decision encourages free-riding, increases pressures for judges and référendaires to con-form, and suppresses dissent, as illustrated in the Microsoft case. Last but not least, the division of labor between the General Court and the Court of Justice could lead to divergent incentives for judges working at different levels of the Court.

An injunction is an equitable remedy with a long history in the courts of equity. The injunctive power historically and necessarily includes the attendant power for a court also to order restitutionary disgorgement of a defendant’s ill-gotten gains, among other forms of equitable monetary relief. That has been a long-standing and steadfast rule in equity jurisprudence for nearly two hundred years. It has also been a consistent holding in this Court’s cases. And this Court has required statutes to be clear and unambiguous in disclaiming traditional equity powers. The FTC Act does not do so. Amici are 43 professors and scholars of remedies, restitution, antitrust, and intellectual property law throughout the United States. Amici include editors of major casebooks and books on Remedies, Antitrust, and Intellectual Property, and one of the amici is the new editor of the leading treatise on Remedies. Many of the amici also have served as Advisers and Members of the Consultative Group to the Restatement (Third) of Restitution and Unjust Enrichment (Am. Law Inst. 2011). Two are the Reporters, and several serve as Advisers, for the Restatement (Third) of Torts: Remedies (in progress). One is President Emeritus of the American Law Institute. All amici have taught at major law schools and regularly publish articles in the areas of remedies, restitution, antitrust, and intellectual property. Amici seek to clarify the history and source of power for equitable remedies incident to injunctions such as disgorgement of a wrongdoer’s profits.

Equitable remedies have begun to play a critical role in addressing some of the systemic issues in criminal cases. Invoked when other solutions are inadequate to the fair and just resolution of the case, equitable remedies, such as injunctions and specific performance, operate as an unappreciated and underutilized safety valve that protects against the procedural strictures and dehumanization that are hallmarks of our criminal legal system. Less familiar equitable-like legal remedies, such as writs of mandamus, writs of coram nobis, and writs of audita querela, likewise serve to alleviate fundamental errors in the criminal process. Several barriers contribute to the limited use and efficacy of these longstanding remedies. Despite the vast numbers of people caught up in the criminal system, society’s aversion to recognizing errors in the system or to acknowledging the humanity of those charged prohibits greater invocation of these remedies. When taken in conjunction with the historically based fear of judicial arbitrariness and unchecked discretion associated with equity courts, these barriers can seem insurmountable. This Article is the first to acknowledge the pervasiveness of equitable remedies in the criminal system, and to advocate for an expanded use of equitable and equitable-like legal remedies in criminal cases. In an era with the odds so overwhelmingly stacked against criminal defendants, equity provides a much-needed check on our criminal system, allowing for the exercise of mercy and justice, not just punitiveness and retribution.

Since 2013 judicial reforms in China have intensified. While recent studies of the Chinese judiciary have focused on structural reforms concerning the jurisdiction of courts and internal court management, it has largely gone unnoticed that the Supreme People’s Court (SPC) has established an open-access database archiving the decisions of every court in China. On the basis of legal documents, secondary literature and interviews with experts, this study investigates the implications of the new database. We find that the database establishes new channels of communication that affect the relationship between the courts and the public, and the position of judges within the judiciary. Further, the open-access database facilitates changes in the structure of communication among legal experts, which in turn promotes legal professionalism. We argue that the SPC made use of the party policy on the direct accountability of the courts towards the people in order to pursue its institutional interest in a professional judiciary.

This Constitutional Court case involved an application by Dengetenge Holdings (Pty) (Ltd) (a junior mining company) for leave to appeal against a decision of the Gauteng North High Court setting aside the award of a prospecting right to Dengetenge, and the decision of the Supreme Court of Appeal (SCA) refusing to condone the company's late filing of its heads of argument in its appeal against the High Court's decision.

Legal precedent serves as the foundation of the common law. Judges provide their reasoning through precedent, citing cases to support their conclusion while distinguishing between cases cited by that counsel in favor of an opposing result. Legal precedent also provides the mechanism by which judges communicate with one another, at the same time providing guidance to prospective litigants and the practicing bar. This process is particularly important for supreme courts, whose decisions bind all lower courts within their jurisdiction. For this reason, in most common‐law jurisdictions, the supreme court decides relatively few cases but draws heavily on precedent for the opinions it issues. The Supreme Court in India stands in contrast to its counterparts in countries such as the United States and Canada in that it decides thousands, rather than tens, of cases. Examining the universe of Court decisions from 1950–2010, we find that the Court elects not to cite precedent in nearly half its opinions. In turn, these opinions without citation to precedent are rarely subsequently cited. However, there is a second set of decisions that is more analogous to U.S. Supreme Court decisions. These decisions do cite prior decisions and are cited by later cases. Opinions that do cite precedent gravitate to older opinions, whose salience often endures for decades. These findings suggest the Court is constrained in its ability to process a heavy caseload, and makes strategic decisions as to which opinions to emphasize through its use of precedent.

This study grew out of my on-the-job blogging. At both the Charleston School of Law and the J. Rueben Clark Law School, I read every opinion from the state and federal appellate courts with jurisdiction over South Carolina and Utah respectively, summarizing the binding authority and posting those summaries online at the Barrister blog and the Binding the Law blog. This has served as excellent current awareness and bar preparation service to the law school communities and a research tool to the legal community generally.

The article examines how states talk about the International Criminal Court (ICC, or the Court) through the lens of Albert Hirschman’s exit, voice and loyalty framework. Based on a content analysis...

InShergill & Others v. Khaira & Others[2014] UKSC 33, the UK courts considered whether a Sikh holy saint had the power to dismiss trustees who questioned his “succession” to the religious institution of theNirmal Kutia Johal. The Supreme Court, reversing the decision of the Court of Appeal that religious questions were “nonjusticiable,” reinstated the judgment at first instance of the High Court to the contrary. The decision of the Supreme Court is important because whenever questions of the identification and legitimacy of successors to a religious institution have arisen, their “justiciability” before a secular court has invariably been a bone of contention on grounds that it threatens the autonomy of religious institutions. InShergillthe Supreme Court got around these concerns by drawing a normative distinction between the public law of the land (which the courts are required to determine), and the internal private law of a religious institution on matters of succession, ordination, and removal (which are not in themselves for the courts to decide). ButShergillalso went further than previous case law in two respects. First, the fundamental tenets of a belief system are capable of an objective assessment by a secular court provided that there is public law element to a dispute, in which case the court can then decide on the fitness of the successor for office. This means there is no general presumption that a secular court is barred from considering religious questions per se. Second, these principles apply just as much to the judicial consideration of non-Christian faiths as they to the Christian religion, and this is so notwithstanding the court's unfamiliarity with other faiths.

Pesticede decision - Env NGO - COM decision T-192/12 – Pesticide Action Network Europe / European Commission Subject GC - dismissed as Implementing Act - is not AA

The decisions of the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU) have had an immense impact on development of European Union law, and this has raised a critical discussion about how the CJEU establishes and uses case law. Through a comparison with the United States Supreme Court (USSC) and network analysis, this article argues that much of the criticism is based on false expectations as to the nature of the CJEU. We argue that the Court of Justice must be understood as a precedent-driven constitutional court and that, if we take that as our starting point, its approach to case law is quite reasonable.

On August 18, 2016, the Constitutional Court of the Republic of Colombia (Constitutional Court or Court) rendered a significant decision in the Garcia de Borissow and Others case on issues of immunity from execution, diplomatic protection, and objections to customary international law in its review of two combined cases brought by former local employees against the embassies of the Lebanese Republic and the United States of America in Bogotá. While upholding the diplomatic missions’ immunity from execution of lower court judgments awarding monetary sums, the Constitutional Court instructed the Colombian Ministry of Foreign Affairs (Foreign Ministry) to pursue recovery of such amounts either by diplomatic means or through enforcement of those judgments in Lebanese and American courts. The decision is both unique and problematic as a matter of international and domestic law.

The United States Supreme Court has significant influence over the development of legal policy, yet it must rely on external actors to bring to fruition the desired effect of its decisions. Among the most important such actors are state high courts who are often motivated to issue decisions promoting policies at odds with the U.S. Supreme Court and who have mechanisms to legitimize such decisions. This study builds on existing work on state court compliance with U.S. Supreme Court precedent by introducing a new theoretical framework that accounts for the impact of state-specific precedent vitality, or the degree to which the high court of a specific state has positively treated a U.S. Supreme Court precedent, on state high court compliance. Our analysis of state high court treatment of Miller v. California provides strong evidence for the importance of state-specific vitality as a determinant of state high court compliance.

The South African adversarial system of civil procedure in the High Court owes its origin to that of England. As with all civil procedural systems, the South African system is not stagnant. Its primary sources, namely Acts of Parliament and rules of court, are constantly amended in an attempt to meet the changing needs of society. Court delay and costinefficient procedural mechanisms, however, contribute to public dismay. The High Court, in the exercise of its inherent power to regulate its process, do so with the purpose of enhancing access to justice. The advantage of the system lies in the fact that it is not cast in stone but could, subject to the Constitution of the Republic of South Africa, 1996, be developed to make it more accessible to the public whilst protecting the public’s fundamental rights entrenched in the Constitution and, in this regard, particularly the right to afair trial embedded in sec. 34 of the Constitution. This contribution gives an overview of the system with reference to the court structure, the judiciary, the process in the High Court and its underlying principles, appeals, class actions and alternative civil dispute resolution mechanisms.

The Constitutional Court does not only interpreting the Constitution in judicial review cases. The Courtalso applies legal construction which include constitutional construction and statutory construction. Thisarticle aims to identify this approach in the Court rulings. It also seeks to find conditions that trigger theCourt to venture on discovering the law by applying legal construction.

It is rare for a national court to be invited to recognise and enforce a judgment from an international or regional court, as opposed to a judgment from a foreign national court. This article examines a decision of the High Court of Ghana given in respect of an application to enforce a judgment of the ECOWAS Court of Justice. The article examines the bases of the Ghanaian court's decision not to enforce the ECOWAS judgment and suggests how future cases may be decided.

УДК 340.15 The subject of research are the courts of England in 16-17 centuries. The purpose of article is to answer the question which courts must be included to a number of "courts of equity". Methodology. Historical analysis of the scientific literature, of the English legislation and judicial practice of the 16-17 centuries. Results. The priority for the Court of Star Chamber was to protect the interests of Royal power and not the rights of people. Moreover, this court did not seek to bridge the gaps of common law. In this regard, his reference to the number of “courts of equity” is incorrect. Star Chamber had a close relationship with the Privy Council. There were no clear boundaries between them during the XVI century. The Star Chamber was the emergency Committee of the Privy Council The purpose of the Court of Requests was to ease social tensions, to create the impression of caring filed emanating from the monarch and the nobility. Despite the fact that the Court of the Requests was conceived as "a court for poor people", it became popular wealthy people under the rule Henry VIII. The Court of High Commission was a court focused on the strengthening of Royal power. In its activities it has been focused on improving the rights of the Kingdom. The Court of Exchequer provided judicial protection for some types of transactions that are not recognized by the common law. In this it is similar to the Chancery Court. Initially, the Court of the Exchequer has been focused on protecting the interests of the crown. Therefore, the function to eliminate the gaps of the common law could not be implemented in full. The Chancery Court, unlike the special courts were required to consider complaints coming from citizens about the inability to get a fair trial. Conclusions. The criteria for judicial institutions to be considered as “courts of equity” are: the purpose of the establishment of the court was to fill gaps in the common law; interference with the jurisdiction of other courts, in fact, has been focused on the eradication the deficiencies of the common law; the court of equity was not supposed to apply a legal fiction in their practice; specialization in civil cases. The number of “courts of equity” may be assigned only by the Chancery Court.

Bush v. Gore was a straightforward and legally correct decision. For more than a quarter century, the Supreme Court has treated the stuffing of ballot boxes as a paradigmatic violation of the Equal Protection Clause. Much more subtle and indirect forms of vote dilution have also been outlawed. Like some of those practices, the selective and partial recount ordered by the Florida Supreme Court may have been an inadvertent form of vote dilution. But that recount had effects that were virtually indistinguishable from those in the paradigmatic case. There is no meaningful difference between adding illegal votes to the count and selectively adding legal votes, which is what the Florida court was doing. The Supreme Court rightly concluded that the vote dilution in this case violated well-established equal protection principles. Nor did the Supreme Court err in its response to this constitutional violation. Although the Court acted with unprecedented dispatch after the Florida court's December 8, 2000 decision, it was highly improbable that a legally proper recount could be conducted by the December 18 deadline set by federal law. And it was quite impossible for such a recount to meet the December 12 deadline that the Florida court itself had found in Florida law. Contrary to a widespread misconception, the U.S. Supreme Court properly accepted the Florida court's interpretation of state law and provided that court with an opportunity to reconsider its own interpretation of state law. When the clock ran out, it was entirely due to mistakes and delays attributable to the Florida court. The Supreme Court's majority opinion has been subjected to a barrage of political criticisms of a kind that might more fittingly be directed against a Senate Majority Leader or a Secretary of State. Ironically, it is precisely because the Justices correctly applied the law that they have been accused of having partisan motives.

This chapter explores the gap between the abstract ideal of fairness and the bodily materiality of retribution. The aim is to suggest how embodied versions of current cognitive science afford a helpful way of talking about the breach between abstractions, or thoughts of fairness, on one hand, and the judgments and punishments produced by actual legal systems on the other. It turns out to be remarkably easy for creatures with brains like ours to leap over the gap, to close the rift produced by evolved brain physiology between abstractions and their physical manifestations. The cognitive theory engaged here is the hypothesis that the grounds of morality and social decision-making—both the feeling of fairness and the institutionalized court systems—can be understood as produced by the structures and processes of human brains in their bodies. My inquiry rests on the co-occurrence of the highly popular revenge tragedies of late sixteenth and early seventeenth century (such as Hamlet) and the conflicts and arguments over the authority of the Chancery, or Equity Courts in London. Was equity, as John Selden later called it, “a roguish thing” that simply reflected the chancellor’s own feelings, in which case the judgments of the court were “above the law,” or was it, as Saint German claimed, grounded in sinderesis, the human mind’s natural understanding of right? The performances of revenge on stage, it is hypothesized, may have helped their audiences understand the direction of change that was needed.

The Supreme Court decision in Ivey v Genting Casinos rejected the two-stage test for dishonesty set out in R v Ghosh and replaced it with a single, objective test which transcends both criminal and civil law. This article asks whether it was correct to create a single test for dishonesty and in doing so, what role will subjectivity now play in the criminal law’s application of what is considered dishonest behaviour. Historically, the civil courts have beset with confusion as to the role of subjectivity in the test for dishonesty in the light of Royal Brunei Airlines v Tan. The author will consider whether lessons can be learned from the civil courts and whether similar problems will trouble criminal law, particularly in the light of criticism of the Ivey test and a preference, by some, for subjectivity to play a greater role in criminal liability for theft and other dishonesty offences.

This chapter considers the actions commenced before the Court of Justice. These include actions by the European Commission and other member states against a member state (Articles 258–60 TFEU); judicial review of acts of the institutions (Article 263 TFEU); the action against the institutions for a failure to act (Article 265 TFEU); actions for damages (Articles 268 and 340 TFEU); and the right to plead the illegality of an EU regulation (Article 277 TFEU). The chapter also considers interim measures under Articles 278 and 279 TFEU and enforcement actions arising from the Commission enforcement of EU competition law against individuals.

The proposed international criminal section of the African Court of Justice and Human and Peoples Rights (the African Criminal Court) involves a number of progressive features. Among them is the Court’s authority to hear cases against corporations for a comprehensive list of international and transnational crimes. According to Article 46C of the African Criminal Court’s statute, entitled ‘Corporate Criminal Liability’, ‘the Court shall have jurisdiction over legal persons, with the exception of States.’ As no international criminal court has yet to exercise jurisdiction over corporations for international or transnational crimes, the African Criminal Court, should it come into operation, will necessarily tread new ground. This paper forensically examines the contours of Article 46C, with a view to elucidating its scope and to explore some of the challenges it raises.

The purpose of this contribution is to examine some salient applications of the comparative law method in the jurisprudence of the European Court of Justice in light of relevant case law of the U.S. Supreme Court involving recourse to foreign and international law in domestic constitutional adjudication. It is divided into three main parts. The first part concerns the European Court of Justice's recourse to the comparative law method in the context of the prohibition of discrimination on grounds of sexual orientation, highlighting parallels to the U.S. Supreme Court's decision in Obergefell v. Hodges. The second part takes up the comparative law method in the context of the interpretation of EU law, focusing on the European Court of Justice's elaboration of the autonomous concepts of "spouse" and "marriage" and the potential implications for the mobility of same-sex couples in the EU, drawing insights from the U.S. Supreme Court's decisions in United States v. Windsor and Obergefell. The third part discusses the comparative law method in the context of the European Court of Justice's review of national and Union measures for compliance with EU fundamental rights, which invites comparisons with some recent U.S. Supreme Court cases on the incorporation doctrine and the standard of review. Altogether, the comparative reflections set forth in this contribution attest to similar challenges facing each Court in the context of constitutional adjudication and provide interesting insights into how the Courts carry out their mandates under their respective constitutional charters. ispartof: American Journal of Comparative Law vol:64 issue:4 pages:841-864 status: published

The literature on the U.S. Supreme Court has paid substantial attention to the perceived legitimacy of the Court’s decisions. However, much less attention has been paid to the perceived legitimacy of the reasons the Court provides for its opinions. We design two experiments to understand how the public perceives opinion content. Unlike prior studies, we take it as a given that the Court uses legal reasons in its decisions. This offers us a baseline by which to compare departures from these legal reasons. We find that extralegal reasons, when paired with legal reasons, do nothing to harm the legitimacy of the Court. Furthermore, we find that even with a lack of legal reasons, the use of extralegal reasons does not harm the legitimacy of the Court, even among those who find that these reasons are inappropriate for the Court to use.

Introduction Court claims against gynaecologists in the Spanish criminal court system are a rare occurrence (less than 3%). These can lead to financial penalties, imprisonment and disqualification. Our aim is to study the court sentences issued in such cases, as these involve the most serious convictions, and to obtain a profile of those convicted.

Resumo Atualmente, o Supremo Tribunal Federal (STF) ocupa hoje posição central no processo político nacional. Suas decisões são a última palavra oficial sobre os temas a que se referem, concentrando poderes para resolver conflitos políticos e morais, para além das esferas majoritárias. Esse cenário, porém, é muito diferente dos anos 1990, quando o STF não ocupava posição tão destacada na política brasileira. Neste artigo, discutiremos essa configuração do poder e do papel do STF por meio de análises do tribunal que a constituinte criou, mas também do que os ministros criaram por meio de práticas institucionais e interpretações de seus próprios poderes. Exploraremos algumas consequências mais recentes da manifestação do próprio poder conferido ao STF nesse processo de reconfiguração institucional, delineando, de maneira preliminar, novas tendências na forma de atuação política do tribunal. Argumentamos, também, que, em vez de atuar apenas como ponto de veto a decisões majoritárias, como câmara revisora do que faz o Congresso, o tribunal já sinalizou disposição para receber (e aceitar) provocações para funcionar como uma espécie de primeira câmara legislativa. Abstract The Brazilian Supreme Federal Court (STF) occupies a central role in the national political process. The court´s decisions have been the last official word on many key constitutional controversies, and it has increasingly asserted its own powers to solve political and moral conflicts, even against majoritarian decisions. This scenario, however, is very different from the 90s, when the court was much less relevant in national politics. In this paper, we engage with and try to map this process of institutional transformation by analyzing and contrasting the court that the constitution created in its original text, and the court that the Justices themselves have recreated, by means of institutional practices and constitutional interpretation of their own powers. We will explore some of the implications of the institutional transformations driven by the court itself, by identifying a set of new trends in the ways by which the court participates in the national political process. The paper concludes by arguing that, instead of acting just as a veto point to majoritarian decisions (that is, as a third legislative chamber), the court has been signaling its willingness to accept (and to rule on) cases in which it will be forced to act as a first legislative chamber.

On March 7, 2014 an African man dressed in a well-tailored, dark grey suit entered the back of a large, unadorned room and sat down. The man seemed overdressed when compared to the more than two do...

This article describes a court improvement initiative designed to promote uniformity and improved court practice with the ultimate goal of the improvement of outcomes for children and families. The article focuses on the results of interviews and focus groups conducted as part of the evaluation of this initiative. Twelve jurisdictions were purposively selected to exhibit a range of family court and non–family court jurisdictions in rural and middle-sized locations. The discussion of the qualitative results focuses on changes in court practice and the impact of the initiative on case time.

The Supreme Court deals with many political cases, where policies are at stake, while on the other hand there is the politics within the Court which can also play an important role. It is difficult to judge the current system without sound empirical and theoretical studies, so one cannot confidently assess the effectiveness of the paper appeals in the American System in the light of the long history of the UK system, of different career paths of advocates in these two countries and of different routes of appointment for judges in both jurisdictions. Nevertheless, any interviews that were conducted with senior judges in the UK were conducted a long time ago and might not be applicable to the current realities. It is true that the British system is open to moderation—the elimination of the House of Lords and its replacement with the Supreme Court is the best example—but maybe more changes are needed. It is paramount that greater diversity in the profession brings fresh perspectives. This is evident in electing practitioners with different career paths, such as Justice Kennedy and Lord Sumption. The president of the Supreme Court, Lord Neuberger, even suggested advertising the next position in the Supreme Court to be on a part time basis, to enable the election of an academic. As stated in the introduction, since Abela and others v Baadarani is a case with important principles at stake, is there a space for political disagreement?

This article analyzes how the public perceives the Supreme Court's decision-making in Burwell v. Hobby Lobby Stores, Inc. (2014) and National Federation of Independent Business v. Sebelius (2012). Using theories of motivated reasoning and cognitive dissonance, I hypothesize that whether an individual approves or disapproves of the Court's decision will influence how they perceive the Court's decision-making. Specifically, those who approve of the Court's decision are more likely to be motivated to perceive the Court's decision-making in a legalistic fashion. However, those who disapprove of the decision are more likely to be motivated to perceive the Court's decision-making in a non-legalistic fashion. I find support for these hypotheses in analysis of both cases. The results presented in this article suggest that scholars need to consider how the public reacts to individual Court cases when studying how the public perceives the Court's decision-making. Further, these findings help explain the gro...

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to consider the impact on rent review clauses of a recent UK Supreme Court ruling on the interpretation and application of contractual provisions. Although the ruling in Arnold v. Britton (2015) UKSC 36 concerned service charge provisions, the court’s approach has significant implications for rent reviews where a fixed or indexed increase is intended. Design/methodology/approach – Review of the Supreme Court’s approach and findings in a case concerning clauses that provided for fixed percentage increases in long leases. Findings – It is no part of the court’s function, through the process of contractual interpretation, to rescue a party from a bad bargain. Research limitations/implications – Supreme Court ruling in Arnold v. Britton was considered in the context of recent rulings on rent review clauses. Practical implications – When drafting for a fixed or stepped increase at rent review, parties must ensure that any formulae or other provisions governing calculation produce results that are fair and in line with the parties’ actual intentions. The court will not use the process of contractual interpretation to rescue a party from a bad bargain, and will not intervene to override clear wording. Although the court has power to decide in favour of commercial common sense where a clause is ambiguous or unclear, there is a limit to the “red ink” that the court can apply, and no room for remedial interpretation where a clause is clear. Social implications – Where contract provisions are clear it is not open to the court to intervene, by means of contractual interpretation, to protect or to rescue a party who has been disadvantaged, however seriously, if the clause is clear. Where such cases arise in a contract covered by English law, or in similar common law jurisdictions, any protection must be found in statute. Originality/value – Practitioner’s review and comments on recent Supreme Court authority.