Commitment and Cooperation on High Courts: A Cross-Country Examination of Institutional Constraints on Judges - Hardcover

Alarie, Benjamin; Green, Andrew J.

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0199397597 ISBN 13: 9780199397594

Publisher: Oxford University Press, 2017

Synopsis

Judicial decision-making may ideally be impartial, but in reality it is influenced by many different factors, including institutional context, ideological commitment, fellow justices on a panel, and personal preference. Empirical literature in this area increasingly analyzes this complex collection of factors in isolation, when a larger sample size of comparative institutional contexts can help assess the impact of the procedures, norms, and rules on key institutional decisions, such as how appeals are decided. Four basic institutional questions from a comparative perspective help address these studies regardless of institutional context or government framework. Who decides, or how is a justice appointed? How does an appeal reach the court; what processes occur? Who is before the court, or how do the characteristics of the litigants and third parties affect judicial decision-making? How does the court decide the appeal, or what institutional norms and strategic behaviors do the judges perform to obtain their preferred outcome? This book explains how the answers to these institutional questions largely determine the influence of political preferences of individual judges and the degree of cooperation among judges at a given point in time. The authors apply these four fundamental institutional questions to empirical work on the Supreme Courts of the US, UK, Canada, India, and the High Court of Australia. The ultimate purpose of this book is to promote a deeper understanding of how institutional differences affect judicial decision-making, using empirical studies of supreme courts in countries with similar basic structures but with sufficient differences to enable meaningful comparison.

About this title

About the Author:

Benjamin Alarie is the Osler Chair in Business Law at the University of Toronto's Faculty of Law. He also serves as President of the Canadian Law and Economics Association. He works primarily in taxation law and judicial decision-making, and he has published in the American Business Law Journal, the British Tax Review, the Canadian Business Law Journal, the Canadian Tax Journal, and many other academic journals. He is co-author of several editions of Canadian Income Tax Law. Prior to joining the Faculty in 2004, Alarie clerked for Madam Justice Louise Arbour at the Supreme Court of Canada. He holds an MA and JD from Toronto and an LLM from Yale.

Andrew J. Green is Associate Professor at the University of Toronto's Faculty of Law. His work focuses on environmental law, international trade and administrative law (how international trade rules constrain countries' ability to implement domestic environmental policy), and the role of law in fostering individuals' environmental values. He has published in the Harvard Environmental Law Review, the Virginia Environmental Law Review, the Supreme Court Law Review, and the Osgoode Hall Law Journal, among others. He holds a BA Hons from Queens, an MA and LLB from Toronto, and an LLM and JSD from Chicago.

Review:

"The law is not an abstract ideal, but something that emerges from a specific institutional context. This book builds on this key idea to analyze how specific institutional features translate into specific legal experiences across several countries with well-established and highly varied legal systems. I highly recommend this book for anyone using comparative methods to understand how the law really works." - Michael A. Bailey, Colonel William J. Walsh Professor, Department of Government and McCourt School of Public Policy, Georgetown University

"A creative new approach to thinking about high courts and how judges do their work. Provides some valuable perspective on the U.S. Supreme Court and charts a path forward in the study of judicial politics." - Keith E. Whittington, William Nelson Cromwell Professor of Politics, Princeton University

"In this ambitious and important book, Alarie and Green build a theory for how the way a court works affects the justice a court affords its citizens. The authors offer an innovative and parsimonious model of appellate court design that is trans-substantive and trans-continental. It will be required reading for those studying courts or seeking to improve them." - Tracey E. George, Charles B. Cox III and Lucy D. Cox Family Professor in Law and Liberty
Vanderbilt University Law School

"How does the institutional design of a country's high court affect how judges decide cases?
In this book, Alarie and Green produced a thoroughly modern, theoretically informed, and empirically grounded analysis of this longstanding question. This book should be required reading for anyone interested in comparative legal institutions." - Kevin Quinn, Professor of Law, University of California, Berkeley

About this edition

• Publisher: Oxford University Press
• Publication date: 2017
• ISBN 10: 0199397597
• ISBN 13: 9780199397594
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 352