Do Formalist Judges Abide By Their Abstract Principles? A Two-Country Study in Adjudication

International Journal for the Semiotics of Law - Revue internationale de Sémiotique juridique - Recent literature in experimental philosophy has postulated the existence of the...     

The Journey to Comprehensibility: Court Forms as the First Barrier to Accessing Justice

International Journal for the Semiotics of Law - Revue internationale de Sémiotique juridique - The article explores the comprehensibility of court forms by providing a quantitative overview...     

A unified model of settlement and trial expenditures: The Priest–Klein model extended

Settlement and trial expenditures are crucially interrelated. The literature on settlement, however, takes no account of models of trial. In this paper, we develop a unified model of settlement and trial expenditures. We do this by discarding the usual assumption of settlement models that trial costs are constant across cases. Instead, we follow the literature on trial by permitting trial costs to vary with the legal merit of the plaintiff's case. Our approach can be used to extend standard models of settlement such as the well-known Priest–Klein model as well as models based on asymmetric information. As a demonstration, we extend the Priest–Klein model and generally overturn that model's canonical results. In particular, we show that even in a fully symmetric model, predicted win rates at trial can deviate substantially from 50 percent. Furthermore, win rates will vary in response to legal reforms that shift the decision standard.     

Between Renewal and Stability: Party System Change from a Multi-Level Perspective in Brazil (1998–2018)

The growth of the far right and election results in Brazil are often associated with national or large-scale events. The multi-level features of these developments, namely party competition at the sub-national level, are overlooked in the literature. This article argues that changes in the Brazilian national party system – those observed from Bolsonaro's election, mainly – are rooted in sub-national political dynamics. Through a comparative and longitudinal analysis of multi-level executive and legislative elections, we find that, although there are distinct patterns of competition between the national-sub-national and within-country levels, this difference is not evident in volatility.