In a ground-breaking study on the nature of judicial behaviour in the Supreme Court of Canada, Donald Songer, Susan Johnson, C.L. Ostberg, and Matthew Wetstein use three specific research strategies to consider the ways in which justices seek to make decisions grounded in "good law" and to show how these decisions are shaped within a collegial court. 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 Collegialitypresents compelling evidence that political ideology is a key factor in decision making and a prominent source of conflict in the Supreme Court of Canada.

The book challenges all formalist accounts of legal interpretation and offers an 'informal' alternative.

Revealing analysis of how judges work as individuals and collectively to uphold judicial values in the face of contemporary challenges.

This original book fills a significant gap in legal literature by providing an exploration of research methodologies in public law; a field of research in which research methods are becoming increasingly prominent and sophisticated. Featuring thoughtful chapters written by leading scholars in the field, this book provides a thorough explanation of the key features, characteristics, and challenges of distinct methodological approaches to public law research.

This timely Research Handbook offers a comprehensive examination of judicial politics, both in the US and across the globe. Taking a broad view of the judiciary in all levels of the court, it examines the present state of the field and raises new questions for future scholarly exploration.

Providing a theory of the collegial form of organization, this text is based on an analysis of a law firm in which partners locked themselves in a long-term situation with no hierarchy or formal power differences to enforce their agreements.

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.

"The Elevator Effect: Contact and Collegiality in the American Judiciary presents a comprehensive, first of its kind examination of the importance of interpersonal relationships among judges for judicial decisionmaking and legal development. Regarding decisionmaking, the authors demonstrate that more frequent interpersonal contact among judges diminishes the role of ideology in judicial decisionmaking to the point where it is both substantively and statistically imperceptible. This finding stands in stark contrast to judicial decisionmaking accounts that present ideology as an unwavering determinant of judicial choice. With regard to legal development, the book shows that collegiality affects both the language that judges use to express their disagreement with one another and the precedents they choose to support their arguments. Thus, the overriding argument of The Elevator Effect is that collegiality affects nearly every aspect of judicial behavior. The authors draw on an impressive and unique original collection of data since the American founding to untangle the relationship between judges' interpersonal relationships and the law they produce. The Elevator Effect presents a clear and highly readable narrative backed by analysis of judicial behavior throughout the U.S. federal judicial hierarchy to demonstrate that the institutional structure in which judges operate substantially tempers judicial behavior"--

Focusing on the behavioral aspects of disagreement within a panel and between the levels of the federal judicial hierarchy, the authors reveal the impact of individual attitudes or preferences on judicial decision-making, and hence on political divisions in the broader society.

This book attempts to demonstrate how the problems of understanding legal reasoning replicate difficulties encountered in the philosophy of language. At the same time, it challenges the attempts that have been made to harness approaches from within that discipline to illuminate legal reasoning. An introductory section deals with some preliminary matters in considering the nature of the relationship between legal theory and the practice of law, the scope of legal reasoning, and the role of the judge. Then the suggestion is made that the practice at the heart of legal reasoning is itself a manifestation of the way in which the limitations of language and the incompleteness of human experience at the same time provide the opportunity for coherent development, as well as displaying an inherent instability. The final section considers some of the implications of this suggestion for the practice of legal definition, an institutional approach to law, the general possibility of providing a theoretical model of law, and the nature of law's critical aperture.