This book provides a comprehensive exploration of ideological patterns of judicial behaviour in the Supreme Court of Canada. Relying on an expansive database of Canadian Supreme Court rulings between 1984 and 2003, the authors present the most systematic discussion of the attitudinal model of decision making ever conducted outside the setting of the US Supreme Court. The groundbreaking discussion of the viability of this model as a unifying theory of judicial behaviour in high courts around the world will be essential reading for a wide range of legal scholars and court watchers.

The authors use confidential interviews with Supreme Court justices, analysis of their rulings from 1970 to 2005, and measures that tap their perceived ideological tendencies to provide a critical examination of the ideological roots of judicial decision making, uncovering the complexity of contemporary judicial behaviour. Examining judicial behaviour through the lens of three different research strategies grounded in qualitative and quantitative methodologies, Law, Ideology, and Collegiality presents compelling evidence that political ideology is a key factor in decision making and a prominent source of conflict in the Supreme Court of Canada.

High courts around the world hold a revered place in the legal hierarchy. These courts are the presumed impartial final arbiters as individuals, institutions, and nations resolve their legal differences. But they also buttress and mitigate the influence of other political actors, protect minority rights, and set directions for policy. The comparative empirical analysis offered in this volume highlights important differences between constitutional courts but also clarifies the unity of procedure, process, and practice in the world’s highest judicial institutions. High Courts in Global Perspective pulls back the curtain on the interlocutors of court systems internationally. This book creates a framework for a comparative analysis that weaves together a collective narrative on high court behavior and the scholarship needed for a deeper understanding of cross-national contexts. From the U.S. federal courts to the constitutional courts of Africa, from the high courts in Latin America to the Court of Justice of the European Union, high courts perform different functions in different societies, and the contributors take us through particularities of regulation and legislative review as well as considering the legitimacy of the court to serve as an honest broker in times of political transition. Unique in its focus and groundbreaking in its access, this comparative study will help scholars better understand the roles that constitutional courts and judges play in deciding some of the most divisive issues facing societies across the globe. From Africa to Europe to Australia and continents and nations in between, we get an insider’s look into the construction and workings of the world’s courts while also receiving an object lesson on best practices in comparative quantitative scholarship today. Contributors: Aylin Aydin-Cakir, Yeditepe University, Turkey * Tanya Bagashka, University of Houston * Clifford Carrubba, Emory University * Amanda Driscoll, Florida State University * Joshua Fischman, University of Virginia * Joshua Fjelstul, Washington University in St. Louis * Tom Ginsburg, University of Chicago * Melinda Gann Hall, Michigan State University * Chris Hanretty, University of London * Lori Hausegger, Boise State University * Diana Kapiszewski, Georgetown University * Lewis A. Kornhauser, New York University * Dominique H. Lewis, Texas A&M University * Chien-Chih Lin, Academia Sinica, Taiwan * Sunita Parikh, Washington University in St. Louis * Russell Smyth, Monash University, Australia * Christopher Zorn, Pennsylvania State University Constitutionalism and Democracy

Policy Change, Courts, and the Canadian Constitution aims to further our understanding of judicial policy impact and the role of the courts in shaping policy change. Bringing together a group of political scientists and legal scholars, this volume delves into a diverse set of policy areas, including health care issues, the regulation of elections, criminal justice policy, minority language education, citizenship, refugee policy, human rights legislation, and Indigenous policy. While much of the public law and judicial politics literatures focus on the impact of the constitution and the judicial role, scholarship on courts that makes policy change its central lens of analysis is surprisingly rare. Multidisciplinary in its approach to examining policy issues, this book focuses on specific cases or policy issues through a wide-ranging set of approaches, including the use of interview data, policy analysis, historical and interpretive analysis, and jurisprudential analysis.

These are momentous times for the comparative analysis of judicial behaviour. Once the sole province of U.S. scholars—and mostly political scientists at that—now, researchers throughout the world, drawing on history, economics, law, and psychology, are illuminating how and why judges make the choices they do and what effect those choices have on society. Bringing together leading scholars in the field, The Oxford Handbook of Comparative Judicial Behaviour consists of ten sections, each devoted to important subfields: fundamentals—providing overviews designed to identify common trends in courts worldwide; approaches to judging; data, methods, and technologies; staffing the courts; advocacy, litigation, and appellate review; opinions; relations within, between, and among courts; judicial independence; court and society; and frontiers of comparative judicial behaviour—dedicated to expanding on opportunities for advancement. Rather than focusing on particular courts, countries, or regions, the organization of the individual chapters is topical. Each chapter explores an important topic-critically evaluating the state of that topic and identifying opportunities for future work. While the forty-two chapters share a common interest in explaining the causes and effects of judicial choices, the range of approaches to comparative research is wide, inclusive, and interdisciplinary, from contrasts and similarities to sophisticated research agendas reflecting the emerging field of judicial behaviour around the world.

Value Change in the Supreme Court of Canada is a groundbreaking analysis of the degree to which Supreme Court decisions reflect the changing values of society over the past four decades. Focusing on three key areas of law: environmental disputes, free speech, and discrimination cases, Wetstein and Ostberg provide a revealing analysis of the language used by Supreme Court justices in landmark rulings in order to document the way that value changes are transmitted into the legal and political landscape. Bolstered by a comprehensive and nuanced blend of research methods, Value Change in the Supreme Court of Canada offers a sweeping analysis of pre- and post-Charter influences, one that will be of significant interest to political scientists, lawyers, journalists, and anyone interested in the increasingly powerful role of the Supreme Court.

The empirical study of law, legal systems and legal institutions is widely viewed as one of the most exciting and important intellectual developments in the modern history of legal research. Motivated by a conviction that legal phenomena can and should be understood not only in normative terms but also as social practices of political, economic and ethical significance, empirical legal researchers have used quantitative and qualitative methods to illuminate many aspects of law's meaning, operation and impact. In the 43 chapters of The Oxford Handbook of Empirical Legal Research leading scholars provide accessible and original discussions of the history, aims and methods of empirical research about law, as well as its achievements and potential. The Handbook has three parts. The first deals with the development and institutional context of empirical legal research. The second - and largest - part consists of critical accounts of empirical research on many aspects of the legal world - on criminal law, civil law, public law, regulatory law and international law; on lawyers, judicial institutions, legal procedures and evidence; and on legal pluralism and the public understanding of law. The third part introduces readers to the methods of empirical research, and its place in the law school curriculum.

Situated between two different constitutional traditions, those of the United Kingdom and the United States, Canada has maintained a distinctive third way: federal, parliamentary, and flexible. Yet in recent years it seems that Canadian constitutional culture has been moving increasingly in an American direction. Through the prorogation crises of 2008 and 2009, its senate reform proposals, and the appointment process for Supreme Court judges, Stephen Harper's Conservative government has repeatedly shown a tendency to push Canada further into the US constitutional orbit. Red, White, and Kind of Blue? is a comparative legal analysis of this creeping Americanization, as well as a probing examination of the costs and benefits that come with it. Comparing British, Canadian, and American constitutional traditions, David Schneiderman offers a critical perspective on the Americanization of Canadian constitutional practice and a timely warning about its unexamined consequences.

Four decades have passed since the adoption of the Constitution Act, 1982. Now it is time to assess its legacy. As Constitutional Crossroads makes clear, the 1982 constitutional package raises a host of questions about a number of important issues, including identity and pluralism, the scope and limits of rights, competing constitutional visions, the relationship between the state and Indigenous peoples, and the nature of constitutional change. This collection brings together an impressive assembly of established and rising stars of political science and law, who not only provide a robust account of the 1982 reform but also analyze the ensuing scholarship that has shaped our understanding of the Constitution. Contributors bypass historical description to offer reflective analyses of different aspects of Canada’s constitution as it is understood in the twenty-first century. With a focus on the themes of rights, reconciliation, and constitutional change, Constitutional Crossroads provides profound insights into institutional relationships, public policy, and the state of the fields of law and politics.

Federal judges are not just robots or politicians in robes, yet their behavior is not well understood, even among themselves. Using statistical methods, a political scientist, an economist, and a judge construct a unified theory of judicial decision-making to dispel the mystery of how decisions from district courts to the Supreme Court are made.