Flexing Judicial Muscle

2011

Author : Corey Rayburn Yung
Release : 2011
Genre :
Kind : eBook
Book Rating : /5 ( reviews)

Book Synopsis Flexing Judicial Muscle by : Corey Rayburn Yung

Download or read book Flexing Judicial Muscle written by Corey Rayburn Yung. This book was released on 2011. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Empirical scholarship about judicial activism has focused on the United States Supreme Court, relied upon subjective coding of individual cases as “activist” or “restrained,” and only examined instances when the federal judiciary invalidated legislative, executive, and state actions. This article contends that such limitations have yielded an extremely narrow and flawed perspective concerning judicial activism and decision-making. In contrast, this article introduces a study of the United States Courts of Appeals that evaluates judicial activism based upon the appellate review of all types of district court judgments using an objective measure that does not rely on coding individual opinions as “activist” or “restrained.” Activism, at its core, is about judges flexing their metaphorical muscles by elevating their judgment above other constitutionally significant actors. By analyzing how individual judges respect both deferential and non-deferential standards of review in reviewing district court judgments, this study captures, in the aggregate, the degree to which judges privilege their judgment. The study utilizes a new dataset that includes over 30,000 judicial votes by judges sitting on the United States Courts of Appeals from 2008 in cases in which a standard of review was applied. The study finds that there is no evidence of a statistically significant correlation between the activism of judges and their political ideology (regardless of how it is measured). However, the study does find that the Courts of Appeals vary substantially in their levels and variations of judicial activism in a statistically significant manner. Further, in reviewing the validity of this study, the article explores in greater detail the judicial activism measurements of four notable jurists: Judges Frank Easterbrook, Richard Posner, (now Justice) Sonia Sotomayor, and J. Harvie Wilkinson III. The article also includes Activism Scores for the 142 judges serving on the Courts of Appeals who had a sufficient number of qualified votes in the dataset.

American Criminal Courts

2013-02-19 Law

Author : Casey Welch
Release : 2013-02-19
Genre : Law
Kind : eBook
Book Rating : 144/5 ( reviews)

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Book Synopsis American Criminal Courts by : Casey Welch

Download or read book American Criminal Courts written by Casey Welch. This book was released on 2013-02-19. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: American Criminal Courts: Legal Process and Social Context is an introductory-level text that offers a comprehensive study of the legal processes that guide criminal courts and the social contexts that introduce variations in the activities of actors inside and outside the court. Specifically the text focuses upon: Legal Processes. U.S. criminal courts are constrained by several legal processes and organizational structures that determine how the courts operate and how laws are applied. This book explores how democratic processes develop the criminal law in the United States, the documents that define law (federal and state constitutions, legal codes, administrative policies), the organizational structure of courts at the federal and state levels, the overlapping authority of the appeals process, and the effect of legal processes such as precedent, jurisdiction, and the underlying legal philosophies of various types of courts. Although most texts on criminal courts do a credible job of describing legal processes, this text looks more deeply into the origins of criminal law, historic turning points in the criminal law, conditions that affect the decision-making of criminal justice practitioners, and the contentious political process that affects how criminal laws are considered. Social Contexts. The criminal courts are staffed by people who represent different perspectives, occupational pressures, and organizational goals. The text includes chapters on actors in the traditional courtroom workgroup (judges, prosecutors, and defense attorneys), as well as those outside the court who seek to influence it, including advocacy groups, media, and politicians. It is the interplay between the court legal processes and the social actors in the courtroom that makes the application of the criminal laws so fascinating. By focusing on the tension between the law (legal processes) and the actors inside and outside the courts system (social contexts), this text demonstrates how the courts are a product of "law in action," and it presents the course content in a way that enables students to understand not only the "how" of the U.S. criminal court system but also the "why."

May It Please the Court

2017-07-28 Law

Author : Brian L. Porto
Release : 2017-07-28
Genre : Law
Kind : eBook
Book Rating : 439/5 ( reviews)

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Book Synopsis May It Please the Court by : Brian L. Porto

Download or read book May It Please the Court written by Brian L. Porto. This book was released on 2017-07-28. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This practical, comprehensive, and engaging introduction to the American judicial system is designed primarily for undergraduate students in criminal justice, liberal arts, political science, and beginning law. It differs from other texts not only by delivering an insider’s view of the courts, but also by demonstrating how the judicial process operates at the intersection of law and politics. Unlike the many dull and inaccessible texts in this field, May It Please The Court conveys the human drama of civil and criminal litigation. With an updated epilogue, case studies, and discussion questions, this third edition is a robust resource for criminal justice students.

The Behavior of Federal Judges

2013-01-07 Law

Author : Lee Epstein
Release : 2013-01-07
Genre : Law
Kind : eBook
Book Rating : 682/5 ( reviews)

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Book Synopsis The Behavior of Federal Judges by : Lee Epstein

Download or read book The Behavior of Federal Judges written by Lee Epstein. This book was released on 2013-01-07. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Judges play a central role in the American legal system, but their behavior as decision-makers is not well understood, even among themselves. The system permits judges to be quite secretive (and most of them are), so indirect methods are required to make sense of their behavior. Here, a political scientist, an economist, and a judge work together to construct a unified theory of judicial decision-making. Using statistical methods to test hypotheses, they dispel the mystery of how judicial decisions in district courts, circuit courts, and the Supreme Court are made. The authors derive their hypotheses from a labor-market model, which allows them to consider judges as they would any other economic actors: as self-interested individuals motivated by both the pecuniary and non-pecuniary aspects of their work. In the authors' view, this model describes judicial behavior better than either the traditional “legalist” theory, which sees judges as automatons who mechanically apply the law to the facts, or the current dominant theory in political science, which exaggerates the ideological component in judicial behavior. Ideology does figure into decision-making at all levels of the federal judiciary, the authors find, but its influence is not uniform. It diminishes as one moves down the judicial hierarchy from the Supreme Court to the courts of appeals to the district courts. As The Behavior of Federal Judges demonstrates, the good news is that ideology does not extinguish the influence of other components in judicial decision-making. Federal judges are not just robots or politicians in robes.

Reflections on Judging

2013-10-07 Law

Author : Richard A. Posner
Release : 2013-10-07
Genre : Law
Kind : eBook
Book Rating : 653/5 ( reviews)

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Book Synopsis Reflections on Judging by : Richard A. Posner

Download or read book Reflections on Judging written by Richard A. Posner. This book was released on 2013-10-07. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Reflections on Judging, Richard Posner distills the experience of his thirty-one years as a judge of the United States Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit. Surveying how the judiciary has changed since his 1981 appointment, he engages the issues at stake today, suggesting how lawyers should argue cases and judges decide them, how trials can be improved, and, most urgently, how to cope with the dizzying pace of technological advance that makes litigation ever more challenging to judges and lawyers. For Posner, legal formalism presents one of the main obstacles to tackling these problems. Formalist judges--most notably Justice Antonin Scalia--needlessly complicate the legal process by advocating "canons of constructions" (principles for interpreting statutes and the Constitution) that are confusing and self-contradictory. Posner calls instead for a renewed commitment to legal realism, whereby a good judge gathers facts, carefully considers context, and comes to a sensible conclusion that avoids inflicting collateral damage on other areas of the law. This, Posner believes, was the approach of the jurists he most admires and seeks to emulate: Oliver Wendell Holmes, Louis Brandeis, Benjamin Cardozo, Learned Hand, Robert Jackson, and Henry Friendly, and it is an approach that can best resolve our twenty-first-century legal disputes.

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Flexing Judicial Muscle

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