CONFIDENTIALITY,DUE PROCESS,AND JUDICIAL DISQUALIFICATION IN THE UNIFIED FAMILY COURT: REPORT TO THE HONORABLE STEPHANIE DOMITROVICH

To the extent that courts realize the pure one judge–one family notion of the unified family court—in which one judge handles all domestic relations, probate, juvenile dependency, juvenile delinquency, and domestic violence cases involving members of the same family—they encounter three potential legal barriers: confidentiality of court records in some of the cases, due process issues arising from the consideration of material from a related case file in which the parties to the current case may or may not be parties, and judicial disqualification arising from the judge's handling of a previous case involving the family. This article summarizes information obtained from a survey conducted for the Children and Family Law Committee of the National Conference of State Trial Judges, of courts in sixteen states, to learn how they have resolved these legal issues.     

RESEARCHING THE SUPREME COURT IN A DEMOCRATIC PLURALIST SYSTEM: Some Thoughts on New Directions

The political processes which invite research and the investment of associated resources are those identified as signiscant by the political theories to which we give credence. Though Democratic Pluralism is the most popular explanation of the political system in the United States, its ability to explain Supreme Court behavior cannot be evaluated, for observation of the processes by which Court agendas for national policy making purposes are constructed is not encouraged. The remedy lies in a new and broader perspective which directs attention to a number of institutional actions and incumbent behaviors until now slighted, if not ignored.     

SUPREME COURT OPINIONS: Getting the Message

The true significance of policy articulations by appellate courts lies in the behavioral responses of relevant parties below. Actions consistent with the intent of appellate sources is dependant on effective communication between message source and message recipient. Limiting focus to the U.S. Supreme Court as an appellate source, two measures of effective communications are developed. These measures incorporate two dimensions of comprehension difficulty: message structure and the familiarity of the reader with constitutional language. The article also suggests 13 hypotheses pertaining to relative communicative success or failure, several of which are tested briefly.     

THE SUPREME COURT OF JUSTICE OF THE REPUBLIC OF AUSTRIA

The aim of this article is to give an overview of the tasks and the function of the Supreme Court of Justice in interaction with the other two “Highest Courts” of the Republic of Austria on the one hand, and the European Court of Human Rights as well as the Court of Justice of the European Union on the other hand. For this purpose introductory remarks will examine the Austrian understanding of the judiciary as a state power and judicial independence. The closing part of the article will particularly look into the role of the Supreme Court as highest instance in criminal matters.     

SUPPORT FOR THE SUPREME COURT AS A NATIONAL POLICYMAKER

The most frequent explanations for the endurance of the Supreme Court's policies and of its power as a national policymaker assume public reverence for the Court, widespread support for it as an institution, or broad-based agreement with its policies. Public opinion studies refute most of these assumptions. Our research confirms those studies and shows, in addition, that the Court cannot claim strong support among occasional political activists. It does, however, have a strong constituency among liberal activists and liberal position-holders. We hypothesize, therefore, that the Court's endurance as a national policymaker is explained by special support from one wing of the dominant party coalition that, because of its strategic location in the complex national policy process, is able to obstruct broadly-based attacks on the Court's authority and policy. Such attacks gain force, however, when critical elections alter the dominant party coalition and therefore weaken the hold of the Court's ideological allies. Yet even then—or at least so far—the Court and its policies have prevailed against various court curbing efforts.     

THE CONCEPTUALIZATION OF DISCRIMINATION IN THE JUVENILE JUSTICE PROCESS: THE IMPACT OF ADMINISTRATIVE FACTORS AND SCREENING DECISIONS ON JUVENILE COURT DISPOSITIONS

Research on race, sex, and social class discrimination in the juvenile justice process has yielded mixed results. These conflicting findings have been attributed to the use of diverse research strategies and various methodological shortcomings. There are, however, two potentially important issues that have not been previously addressed: the need to examine the juvenile justice system as a process, rather than as a series of separate and unrelated decision points, and the failure to control for the impact of administrative factors such as pretrial detention. The purpose of the research reported here is to examine the impact of race, sex, and social class on juvenile court dispositions while controlling for pretrial detention and appropriate legal factors. The analytical strategy employed permits an examination of the impact of these factors over three stages of the juvenile justice process: referral, adjudication, and disposition.
Findings indicate that while legal factors and pretrial detention decline in importance as predictors of disposition as one moves from an examination of all referred to adjudicated youth, race and social class become more important. These results are discussed in terms of their methodological significance and their implications for the conceptualization of discrimination in the juvenile justice process.     

INVOLVING YOUTH IN THE DEPENDENCY COURT PROCESS: THE WASHINGTON STATE EXPERIENCE

In 2008, the Washington State legislature established a pilot program in four designated sites wherein youth ages twelve years and older had the right to (1) receive notice of all dependency hearings that involve them, (2) be present at such hearings, and (3) be heard personally. Pursuant to the legislation, upon request by the youth, the court participating in the pilot program is permitted to conduct an in‐chambers interview with the youth to determine his or her wishes regarding issues pending before the court. The legislation further required that the Administrative Office of the Courts and the Department of Social and Health Services collaborate in implementing and assessing the effectiveness of the program. This article details the development of the pilot program, its implementation, and evaluation results as of the date of this publication.     

THE SUPREME COURT AND CAPITAL PUNISHMENT: A Quest for Balance between Legal and Societal Morality

The interrelationships of legal and societal morality are examined through an analysis of judicial opinions in the Supreme Court's review of the constitutionality of the death penalty. Neither community standards nor considerations of utility provided the justices with a satisfactory basis for rejecting or regulating the death penalty. Resting their decisions instead on grounds of fairness, the justices endorsed a mode of jury guidance and monitoring that potentially facilitates citizen participation in the process of "evolving standards of decency." Legal morality thus is used as the justification for a decision that affects societal morality in a manner likely to limit rather than to expand the gap between the two moralities .