Supremacy and hegemony: a reply to Palmer and Martin

In a 2019 article in this journal, which drew on previous work, we argued by examination of a number of extremely important cases that the senior judiciary is in the process of attempting to create judicial supremacy in the UK. It is doing so, not by democratic debate, but by legal procedural innovation incomprehensible to the electorate. Invited by the journal to reply to a criticism of our argument by Dr Stephanie Palmer and Dr Stevie Martin, we have sought to defend our account of the undemocratic procedural novelty of those cases.     

Case Processing Times in Three Courts

The time it takes a court to process its cases, a critical aspect of court performance, varies widely from case to case, from court to court, and within a given court as the court and its environment change over time. The sources of this variation, however, have remained largely obscure.
This paper examines the structural and case-level influences on processing times in three criminal courts experiencing structural changes, including a number of administrative reforms designed to reduce processing times. We find both similarities and differences between courts, but in general both many structural arrangements and many case characteristics affect processing times, with some case characteristics having different effects under different structural arrangements, and some structural arrangements affecting different sorts of cases differently. We conclude with a discussion of implications for court management.     

Is Narco‐Violence in Mexico Terrorism?

Mexico's drug ‘war’ produced 100,000 deaths between 2006 and 2012. The extreme violence has raised the notion that Mexico has become a failed state wracked by terrorism. We categorise the forms of narco‐violence in Mexico in light of the literature on terrorism and contemporary Mexican politics. Our study suggests three overlapping dimensions of narco‐violence that should be considered terrorism: (a) narco‐terror as a struggle for regional political control; (b) narco‐terror as a practice ordered by cartel leaders rather than spontaneous violence of foot soldiers; and (c) narco‐terror as an expansion strategy from solely drug trafficking to other kinds of organised crime.