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The article focuses on the legal fate of federal judges' papers after they retire. It states concerns involving the papers, citing that documents could involve issues of employee privacy and attorney work product, and mentions that in case of a judge's death before reviewing his papers, the descendants are faced with the task of deciding what to do with years of judicial files and papers. It notes that chambers papers of a federal judge remain the private property of that judge .

The article profiles former federal Judge John Thomas Noonan Jr. Topics include the career highlights of Noonan including his advocacy in promoting human life and pro-life views and notes the notable cases handled by Noonan wherein his views are put into practice. A brief background personal information of the early life of Noonan including his family and education are presented

Under what conditions do citizens of developing countries view judges as neutral and fair or biased and arbitrary? This study addresses this topic through an original, nationally representative survey from the Middle East and North Africa (MENA). Conducted in Morocco, the survey is the first of its kind to gauge attitudes about how a citizen’s informal influence facilities getting favorable rulings from judges. It finds that 82 percent of respondents believe that citizens with “connections”—known as wasta in Arabic—get favorable rulings. Yet some citizens more strongly value informal influence, especially rural individuals, women, and ethnic minorities. The survey shows that believing in informal influence considerably lowers citizen trust in the authoritarian regime’s courts and institutions, which some scholars consider an asset for democratization. However, because the citizens most likely to value informal influence are marginalized or embedded in regime clientelism, their low trust may not easily translate into strong advocacy for democracy. Meanwhile, the citizens most able to advocate for democratization—the Francophone petite bourgeoisie—disproportionately deny the importance of informal influence in regime institutions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

One of the great realizations of CMR lies in the fact that it provides uniform rules for contracts for carriage of goods by road. This doesn't mean however that the Convention unified the entire field of road transport logistics, as the scope of application of CMR is restricted by 10 conditions. Despite the great importance of the demarcation of the scope of application, the Convention doesn't provide any guidance as to the interpretation of these conditions. Albeit VCLT requires a treaty autonomous interpretation of the Convention, with this, the Convention gives a wide discretionary margin to individual judges. As a result, judges tend to take into account national law rules to decide upon the applicability and even turn to desirability arguments. With ongoing evolutions in logistics this discretionary margin can even further increase. Literature on VCLT permits an evolutionary evolution of Conventions, in so far the Convention itself implicitly or explicitly permits such interpretation. VCLT itself doesn't give any guidelines of such evolutionary interpretation. With this, individual judges first need to decide whether the Convention was intended to allow for an evolutionary interpretation and later they need to decide what such interpretation would mean for the applicability of the Convention. Unless a new mechanism to safeguard the uniform interpretation of article 1 can be developed, the uniformity brought by CMR is thus at risk to disappear in the future due to the absence of a uniform determination of the scope of application in national case law. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Existing research shows that the ideas of judges shape their behaviour. A natural next question to ask is, where do these ideas come from? Yet, there is little empirical evidence regarding the content and distribution of these ideas and even less evidence regarding the sources of these ideas, especially how ideas transfer or diffuse among judges. In this article, a survey of judges in the Mexican state of Michoacán generates original data on the attitudes and professional ties among these legal elites, and a mixed-methods design examines the diffusion of these attitudes along these ties, sequencing quantitative network analyses and interviews with judges to strengthen causal inferences. The core finding that the social structure of judges influences the attitudes judges hold contributes a valuable analytic complement to scholarship on comparative judicial behaviour, and clarifies our understanding of the role of judicial networks in strengthening democracy and the rule of law. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article explores sources of recruitment of judges and the influence of the social characteristics of judges on professional culture. Using the original survey and interview data from the Russian Federation, the authors identify and explain the changes in recruitment patterns that followed the judicial reform in the early 2000s. The authors look for profession-related differences between judges who had prior experience of work in the prosecutor's office and judges who were recruited from the court's non-judicial technical staff or from police investigation. Other key issues addressed are the bureaucratization and feminization of the judiciary. Using the survey designed to reveal professional values, norms and attitudes of judges, the authors highlight different professional subcultures constituted by certain combinations of social characteristics of judges. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

In this article, we consider whether personal relationships can affect the way that judges decide cases. To do so, we leverage the natural experiment of a child's gender to identify the effect of having daughters on the votes of judges. Using new data on the family lives of U.S. Courts of Appeals judges, we find that, conditional on the number of children a judge has, judges with daughters consistently vote in a more feminist fashion on gender issues than judges who have only sons. This result survives a number of robustness tests and appears to be driven primarily by Republican judges. More broadly, this result demonstrates that personal experiences influence how judges make decisions, and this is the first article to show that empathy may indeed be a component in how judges decide cases. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The federal Courts of Appeals are the courts of last resort for the vast majority of contested legal issues, and decide the cases that are of the greatest importance for the development of the law in the United States. Presidents seek to leave their political and ideological marks on these courts through their judicial nominations. But what happens when a new president nominates judges to a Court of Appeals with a collective ideology different than his or her own? What near term effect do these new judges have on the overall ideology of the Courts of Appeals on which they serve? Given the body of precedent each Court of Appeals builds over years and decades, can new judges have a meaningful impact on the overall ideology of a Court of Appeals in the near term? This paper seeks to begin answering these questions by engaging in the first ever quantitative analysis of the near term impact of a president's successful judicial nominees on the ideology of a federal Court of Appeals. As the results of this study show, new judges can have a significant impact on the ideology of a Court of Appeals in the near term and can even alter the court's overall ideology. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Over the last few decades, judges and courts have had an important role in global governance. They also now communicate with each other more than they used to. Scholars have named this phenomenon 'the transnational judicial dialogue.' This paper calls for a comprehensive understanding of this judicial dialogue in a way that will explain the influence it has on courts. This paper proposes to use the concept of organisational fields, developed by DiMaggio and Powell, to study the relationships between courts. It will be seen that this concept gives a fuller account of those relationships and their effects than the existing approaches. This paper will first show that the transnational organisational field of the courts is now emerging using the four criteria of structuration. Then, the paper will discuss three examples of how this concept can contribute to the study of transnational relationships between courts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the role of a judge's social background and the role of the leadership of the chief justice in explaining variations in dissent rates on the High Court [...]

The possibility of Pres George W. Bush's appointing an Hispanic American to the US Supreme Court is raising the issue of how to define Hispanic Americans. Portuguese descent is considered Hispanic by some federal programs and the Library of Congress but not by most Hispanic advocacy groups.

Although memory can be hazy at times, it is often assumed that memories of violent or otherwise stressful events are so well encoded that they are effectively indelible and that confidently retrieved memories are almost certainly accurate. However, findings from basic psychological research and neuroscience studies indicate that memory is a reconstructive process that is susceptible to distortion. In the courtroom, even minor memory distortions can have severe consequences that are partly driven by common misunderstandings about memory - for example, that memory is more veridical than it may actually be. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Using the Martin-Quinn ideology scores, we show that U.S. Supreme Court justices strategically respond to Supreme Court membership change. At the aggregate level, the Court moves to counterbalance the ideological change brought about by a new justice. The behavior is most prevalent in 1938-48 (a period of "constrained liberalism") and 1975-95 (a period of "constrained conservatism"). At the individual level, membership change in the conservative direction leads to a greater response from liberal justices, while a change in the liberal direction leads to a greater response from the conservative justices. One possible implication of our results is that the prevalence of this counterbalancing reaction to membership change may have a stabilizing effect on the aggregate ideology of the Supreme Court. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Evoking the Administrative Judge today, it is above all justify its raison d'être and its usefulness and it now finally watches in the past, why and how he won (1) but also what is its current legal status (2) what are the practical problems it faces (3) and finally, make an inventory, quick and concrete, its composition and its litigation skills (4). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

One aspiration of an analytic jurisprudential theory is to provide an account of how legal obligations arise, including the legal obligation of judges to apply only legally valid norms when adjudicating cases. Also, any fully adequate theory should enable a solution to a ‘chicken-egg’ puzzle regarding legal authority: legal authority can exist only in virtue of rules that authorize it, but such rules require a legal authority as their source. Which came first? This article argues that it is difficult to see how a particular type of positivist theory (featuring a fundamental norm that plays certain roles) can solve the puzzle and also account for the aforementioned adjudicative duty. The challenge can be framed in terms of the need to be able to derive a legal ‘ought’ (applying to courts) from only ‘is’-statements expressing social facts, where the requisite derivation cannot rely on what John Searle has called ‘institutional facts’. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The article presents a study which discusses aspects of judicial internationalization and the social exchanges among judges. Topics discussed include the way judges exchange and retrieve information beyond their borders, the characters of transjudicial dialogue, and the involvement of judges in institutional entrepreneurship.

The article presents a speech by Dame Sian Elias, the Chief Justice of New Zealand, delivered at the Conference of the Family Courts of Australia, held in Sydney, New South Wales, July 26, 2001, in which he discussed the changes seen and can be expected by people of New Zealand and Australia from their respective family courts, the need for family court judges to play a more positive role in society, and problems such as the lack of legal aid funding and the increase in unrepresented litigants.