Child support order: how do judges decide without guidelines? Evidence from France

The paper presents a model of family judges’ child support orders when no guidelines are available. Based on the French case, it argues that judges weigh up their wish to comply with their institutional environment against their discretion and their willingness to find a compromise, by basing their decision on the parties’ average offer. Using experimental data consisting of child support awards set by approximately 80 French judges, the findings of the paper suggest that family judges promote parents’ child support offer when there is an agreement between them, particularly when their offer is lower than the amount deemed necessary to preserve the child’s interest. There is also some evidence that female judges are likely to be more generous than male judges, although in small amounts and under certain circumstances.     

从制度上保证审判独立——以司法独立的国际标准为参照

司法独立的国际标准要求法院和法官在行使审判权的时候不受干预,有关各方也不得进行干预,并且还应当为法院和法官独立审判提供积极保障。我国的审判独立原则包含了法院集体独立和法官个体独立的内涵,但无论是在立法上还是在实践中,都与国际标准存在着一定差距。只有以国际标准为指导,对我国不符合审判独立要求的制度和做法进行改革,才能够达到从制度上保证审判独立的目的。     

Can feminist judges make a difference?

Many of the expectations and aspirations about the ‘difference’ that women judges would make have proved unrealistic, given the inevitable diversity and often conservatism of women appointed as judges. On the other hand, we might reasonably expect feminist judges to ‘make a difference’. This essay focuses on feminist judges, and seeks to identify what it is that we might reasonably expect of them. This in turn requires consideration of who counts as a feminist judge, what might be included in a feminist approach to judging, and what institutional norms inherent within the judicial role might constrain the adoption of a feminist approach. The essay concludes that feminist judges both can and ought to make a difference across a wide range of judicial activities.     

Attitudes toward sentencing guidelines and simulated sentencing among Missouri circuit court judges

This study examines attitudes toward sentencing guidelines and simulated sentencing practices among Missouri circuit court judges. In addition, the study investigates the efficacy of sentencing workshops by comparing judges who attended or did not attend workshops. All Missouri circuit court judges were mailed surveys and 97 judges responded. Results indicated that judges generally felt positive toward Missouri’s voluntary sentencing guidelines, but often failed to refer to the guidelines when sentencing sample cases. Attendance at a sentencing workshop was not associated with attitudes about Missouri sentencing guidelines or sentencing in simulated cases. Sentencing in simulated cases varied by nature of the crime and circuit type. Judges from metropolitan areas tended to sentence more leniently than judges from rural areas. In their written comments, many judges expressed fear about the possibility of mandatory guidelines. Results suggest that there is ambivalence among Missouri judges over the acceptance and use of sentencing guidelines.     

Female Delinquents: the Effect of Offense Characteristics on Adult Criminal Careers in the 1958 Philadelphia Birth Cohort

This paper uses the official juvenile offenses among delinquent girls in the 1958 Philadelphia Birth Cohort to investigate the two overarching questions. This research investigates the nature of delinquency conduct, offense-by-offense, and its relationship to adult crime status. Although it is convenient to think of an offender’s delinquency career as a whole, such a career actually consists of one or more specific offenses, and offense conduct can be worth studying in its own right. Thus, it is necessary to determine whether the timing, type, severity, court disposition, and so on, of these juvenile offenses can be used to predict adult career pathways. An extensive review of the literature revealed that investigations of early offense conduct and its connection to adult crime are exceedingly scarce. This study indicates as follows. First, the way a delinquent begins her criminal career is predictive of the adult trajectory that will be followed. Second, we also found that aspects of the first few offenses doe influence whether delinquent girls do continue committing crimes as adult. The strongest predictor of adult crime status was juvenile court dispositions.     

Understanding judicial discretion

The main aim of this paper is to clarify the dispute over judicial discretion by distinguishing the different senses in which claims about judicial discretion can be understood and by examining the arguments for these various interpretations. Three different levels of dispute need to be recognized. The first concerns whether judges actually do exercise discretion, the second involves whether judges are entitled to exercise discretion, and the third is about the proper institutional role of judges. In this context, the views of Dworkin, Raz, Perry, Greenawalt, and Sartorius are examined. Finally, it is suggested that a resolution of the judicial discretion controversy requires a satisfactory theory of the justification of judicial decisions.     

Being a woman judge in Turkish judicial culture

ABSTRACT

This study is a feminist exploration of how gender influences the professional and social lives of women judges in Turkey. I asked women judges from lower courts to talk about their professional journey to explore if and how gender emerges as a category that makes sense to them. Gender was sometimes more visible in the form of a “success” story of playing along men’s rules, or in memories of struggling to balance work and family; while other times it was more implicit in narratives on meeting expectations, failing expectations, ignoring expectations. All in all, these narratives attest to the gendered hierarchies and instances of institutional sexism in what is considered a masculine profession. They also reveal the prevalence of a particularly conservative and patriarchal culture upon the ways in which these inequalities and disadvantages are experienced by women judges in Turkey.     

Insider Privatisation and Restructuring Incentives

In the literature on privatisation and restructuring it is a generally held belief that manager owned firms will be restructured more rigorously than worker owned companies. This gives the clear recommendation that property rights and control rights should be allocated to managers in the process of (insider-) privatisation. One of the implied arguments is, that managers' career concerns will make them eager to prove their ability by improving company efficiency. The present model shows that in the transition context managers' career concerns might result in the opposite effect. If the bulk of job opportunities are in worker controlled firms, the managers of the few manager controlled firms will want to appear soft on excess labour capacity – hence, restructure less harshly – in order to improve their career opportunities.     

Judges,Conflict, and the Past

Drawing upon interviews with senior judicial figures in Northern Ireland, South Africa and elsewhere, this article considers the role of the judiciary in a political conflict. Using the socio‐legal literature on judicial performance and audience as well as transitional justice scholarship, the article argues that judges in Northern Ireland ‘performed’ to a number of ‘imagined’ audiences including Parliament, ‘the public', and their judicial peers – all of which shaped their view of the judicial role. In light of ongoing efforts to deal with the past in the jurisdiction, and the experiences of other transitional societies, the article argues that the judiciary can and should engage in a mature, reflexive and, where appropriate, self‐critical examination of the good and bad of their own institutional history during the conflict. It also argues that such a review of judicial performance requires an external audience in order to encourage the judiciary to see truth beyond the limits of legalism.     

The Costs and Benefits of American Policy‐Making Venues

Many law and policy scholars consider judges inimical to good public policymaking, and the criticisms they level on the judiciary implicitly reflect some of the concerns raised by Alexander Bickel and other critics. Despite the charge by critics that judges are institutionally ill equipped to participate in the policy‐making process and that legal processes are costly, there are reasons to believe otherwise. This article uses field interviews and three case studies of an environmental dispute in the Pacific Northwest to show that the judiciary can be an institutional venue that enhances public input, can be more inclusive than other venues, and produces positive‐sum outcomes when other venues cannot. The findings also suggest that legislative and agency policymaking are just as contentious and costly as judicial policy‐making processes.     

Faith in the Court: Religious Out‐Groups and the Perceived Legitimacy of Judicial Decisions

The question of whether judges’ personal characteristics and values bias their decision making has long been debated, yet far less attention has been given to how personal characteristics affect public perceptions of bias in their decision making. Even genuinely objective judges may be perceived as procedurally biased by the public. We hypothesize that membership in a religious out‐group will elicit stronger public perceptions of biased decision making. Using a survey experiment that varies a judge's religious orientation and ruling in a hypothetical Establishment Clause case, we find strong evidence that judges’ religious characteristics affect the perceived legitimacy of their decisions. Identifying a judge as an atheist (a religious out‐group) decreases trust in the court, while identifying the judge as a committed Christian has no bearing on legitimacy. These results are even stronger among respondents who report attending church more often. Thus, we argue that perceptions of bias are conditioned on judges’ in‐group/out‐group status.     

Judicial misconduct

Although judges are subject to the same human frailty as all other members of society, they must expect their conduct to be the subject of constant public scrutiny. This article examines instances of judicial misconduct in the USA. It considers various aspects of misconduct including humour, courtroom management, denigration of lawyers, racist speech, sexual harassment, acceptance of gifts, alcohol misuse, and financial conduct. These illustrations of misconduct by judicial colleagues are intended to serve as cautionary tales from which judges in other jurisdictions can learn lessons as they to seek to act in a manner that promotes public confidence.     

How Litigants in Dutch Courtrooms Come to Trust Judges: The Role of Perceived Procedural Justice,Outcome Favorability,and Other Sociolegal Moderators

This paper examines the hypothesis that litigants' perceived procedural justice is positively associated with their trust in judges. We argue that although this association might seem quite robust, it can vary across contexts. In particular, we suggest that the nature and magnitude of the association between procedural justice and trust in judges depends on outcome concerns, and other sociolegal moderators such as outcome importance and prior court experience. We tested our predictions in three different types of law cases among 483 litigants at court hearings of the district court of the Mid‐Netherlands. As predicted, our results indicate that perceived procedural justice was positively associated with trust in judges when outcomes were relatively favorable, and that this association was even stronger when outcomes were relatively unfavorable. The courtroom context studied here enabled us to explore how other sociolegal variables moderated these relationships.     

The Impact of Training and Language Competence on Judicial Application of EU Law in Hungary

The aim of this research is to identify the role that training in EU law and in a foreign language play in the use of EU law by Hungarian judges in domestic proceedings. Judges in the new Member States face the problems of no or inadequate official EU translations of relevant EU law or case‐law. The need to compare the meaning of other language versions therefore comes into play in order that the judges comply with the requirements of Union loyalty in the Treaty on European Union: Hungarian judges are shown to exhibit certain creative responses to these challenges. The approach to the research is based on an examination of the institutional framework for judicial training, a selection of pertinent case‐law of the Hungarian courts as well as interviews with a number of judges involved in the application of EU law in their courts.     

The Impact of Race on the Pretrial Decision

This study examined the effect of race on the pretrial release decision for drug offenders. Although this decision point has not been examined as extensively as the final sentencing decision, it is a critical discretion point which impacts defendants’ future sentencing outcomes. The results found that race had a significant impact on judges’ decisions to release a defendant on recognizance, with black defendants less likely to receive this release status. Race was not significant, however, in the decision of bail amount or in the likelihood to post bail. These results are consistent with the focal concerns perspective which suggests that black defendants are viewed by courts as more dangerous and blameworthy and thereby, less likely to be released on their own recognizance.     

Why Fair Procedures Always Make a Difference

Section 31(2A) of the Senior Courts Act 1981 (as inserted by the Criminal Justice and Courts Act 2015) requires judges to refuse relief in judicial review of administrative decisions if it is ‘highly likely’ that the conduct complained of did not make a significant difference to the outcome of the decision. The strongest justification for this ‘Makes No Difference’ principle is provided by a ‘narrow instrumental view’ of fair procedures, according to which their value lies only in their producing the correct outcome. This conception of procedural fairness, however, is impoverished and flawed as a matter of political morality. Fair procedures reflect a conception of citizens as participants in their own governance and play an important communicative role in democratic legal orders. Inasmuch as it leaves no room for these aspects of the value of fair procedures, the Makes No Difference principle embodied in section 31(2A) is pro tanto unjust.     

The Role of Societal Benefits and Fairness Concerns Among Decision Makers and Decision Recipients

Four experiments examined the role of costs and benefits versus procedural and distributive justice for procedural fairness and procedural evaluations among decision makers and decision recipients. Experiments 1 and 2 examined the responses of actual judges in a 2 (high versus low benefit) x 2 (search procedure conducted respectfully versus disrespectfully) randomized factorial. In both studies judges evaluated procedures differently than is typical among samples of decision recipients: outcome concerns strongly influenced both procedural evaluations and procedural fairness while procedural concerns such as voice and respect were minimally influential. Whereas fairness concerns continued to be important among these decision makers, outcome fairness was more influential than procedural fairness. Studies 3 and 4 varied role (authority versus subordinate), procedural respect, and societal benefits. Both experiments supported our predictions that procedural criteria would dominate the procedural evaluations of subordinates whereas outcome concerns such as societal benefits would dominate the procedural evaluations of authorities.     

Judicial Procedural Involvement (JPI): A Metric for Judges’ Role in Civil Litigation,Settlement, and Access to Justice

We examine judges’ role in civil litigation by studying empirically the relationship between judicial procedural involvement (JPI) and lawsuits’ mode of disposition (MoD). Furthermore, we propose JPI as a metric for the allocation of judicial attention to litigants. Applying the framework to Israeli trial court data, we find that 60 per cent of cases included JPI (through hearings and rulings on motions) whereas 40 per cent involved only the court's institutional function. By juxtaposing JPI and MoD data, we shed light on the scope of judicial involvement in settlements, the ratio between judges’ normative public-life function and their problem-solving function, and other pertinent questions. Since nowadays lawsuits are rarely adjudicated, trial rates are low, and litigants in person (pro se litigants) are common, we argue that access to justice should also be construed in terms of access to judicial attention throughout the proceeding, which is readily measurable through JPI.     

释明的理论逻辑

释明有时会使案件结果发生逆转,所以必须有逻辑可循。释明不得背离保护权利、维护实质正义的释明主旨和其他正当目的,不能超出当事人主张的事实和已呈现的事实。此为释明的目的边界和事实边界。时效制度与释明制度之主旨相悖,所以不能就时效释明。在事实边界内,法官应进行一切合目的的释明,包括对当事人未主张的权利和重要事实的释明,原告的请求额不足时也应释明。法官就事实无法形成心证时应告知当事人追加证据。遵循逻辑的释明不会使法官丧失中立性。辩论主义并非绝对不可突破,也不能以尊重处分权为名漠视权利之丧失。     

The interaction of international institutions from a social network perspective

The literature increasingly acknowledges that international institutions do not exist in isolation, but regularly interact with each other. This interplay might induce influence, affecting institutions’ development and performance. The following research adds to this debate by systematically analyzing the quantitative evidence on how institutional interaction drives institutional design from a network perspective. Using dyadic cross-sectional data on international environmental agreements in 1952–2000, the authors find support for their theoretical argument that regimes’ similarity in design as captured by their degree of legalization strongly depends on institutions’ interaction. However, while “soft law” disseminates between regimes that are well connected through direct or indirect links, this does not apply to “hard law.” The authors explain this divergence with states’ concerns about binding-law commitments and sovereignty costs associated with the latter. This research may have important implications for studies of international institutions and of network analysis in general.