Judging Credentials

Must judges be trained as lawyers in order to be effective in office, or can nonlawyers serve equally well? This question has long provoked controversy among lawyers, judges, legislators, and the public. In her empirical study of the place of the nonlawyer judge in the American legal system, Doris Marie Provine concludes that, despite the opposition of the legal profession to nonlawyer judges, they are as competent as lawyers in carrying out judicial duties in courts of limited jurisdiction. Provine presents a persuasive argument that the case against nonlawyer judges has been weighted in favor of the professional interests of lawyers, not public concerns. Her examination reveals as much about the presuppositions of legal professionals as it does about the competency of nonlawyer judges to old judicial office. To substantiate her claims, Provine has conducted the most comprehensive survey of nonlawyer and lawyer judges yet undertaken, augmenting this material with court observations and extensive interviews of judges. She integrates the results of this survey into the historical context of the lay versus lawyer judge debate, showing how the legally trained judge came to predominate in the American judicial system and analyzing in detail the campaign both in and out of the courts to make legal training a prerequisite for being a judge. Ultimately, Provine suggests, Americans are too committed to the significance of credentials and to the legal profession's vision of the judicial process to respond very favorably to nonlawyer judges, however well they might perform. Judging Credentials will force lawyers, judges, scholars, and the public to reconsider the role nonlawyer judges play in the American judicial system. Provine's provocative views and exhaustive research adds new dimensions to our understanding of the ethics of professionalism and its consequences.

This book discusses the Constitutional right to a neutral decisionmaker, focusing on U.S. Supreme Court cases on the Sixth Amendment guarantee to a jury in criminal cases and to the due process requirements of an impartial judge and a neutral decisionmaker in quasi-judicial contexts. The work explores how these rights have evolved, and it critically examines relevant Court cases.

Our courts, the third branch of the government, are central in the administration of our democracy. But their operations are shrouded in a mythology with its ritual incantations of "rule of law," "equal justice" and "presumption of innocence"--one that this book pierces. We have 30,000 judges. Many are hard-working and distinguished jurists; most are simply lawyers who knew a politician. It does not help that the job pays poorly. We have no judicial profession: we do not train judges before or after they mount the bench. There is no national court system. Fifty sovereign states, a federal government, counties and municipalities and state and federal agencies all have their own courts, their own rules and not infrequently their own laws and are deluged with cases filed by a million lawyers. Today, less than 3% of criminal charges and 4% of civil disputes are resolved by court trials. The noted author argues that a specialized world demands specialized courts and judges expert in the subjects they must consider. Following the leadership of Chief Judge Judith Kaye of New York's highest court, the Conference of Chief Justices from all fifty states has endorsed her use of "problem-solving courts" to take the judiciary into the twenty-first century. The Judges is Martin Mayer's most important book from many successful titles dating from the 1950s. It opens up a debate that will occupy scholars, justices, many of the one million lawyers in our country, and law school professors and students for years to come.

Does gender make a difference to the way the judiciary works and should work? Or is gender-blindness a built-in prerequisite of judicial objectivity? If gender does make a difference, how might this be defined? These are the key questions posed in this collection of essays, by some 30 authors from the following countries; Argentina, Cambodia, Canada, England, France, Germany, India, Israel, Italy, Ivory Coast, Japan, Kenya, the Netherlands, the Philippines, South Africa, Switzerland, Syria and the United States. The contributions draw on various theoretical approaches, including gender, feminist and sociological theories. The book's pressing topicality is underlined by the fact that well into the modern era male opposition to women's admission to, and progress within, the judicial profession has been largely based on the argument that their very gender programmes women to show empathy, partiality and gendered prejudice - in short essential qualities running directly counter to the need for judicial objectivity. It took until the last century for women to begin to break down such seemingly insurmountable barriers. And even now, there are a number of countries where even this first step is still waiting to happen. In all of them, there remains a more or less pronounced glass ceiling to women's judicial careers.

Social scientists have convincingly documented soaring levels of political, legal, economic, and social inequality in the United States. Missing from this picture of rampant inequality, however, is any attention to the significant role of state law and courts in establishing policies that either ameliorate or exacerbate inequality. In Judging Inequality, political scientists James L. Gibson and Michael J. Nelson demonstrate the influential role of the fifty state supreme courts in shaping the widespread inequalities that define America today, focusing on court-made public policy on issues ranging from educational equity and adequacy to LGBT rights to access to justice to worker’s rights. Drawing on an analysis of an original database of nearly 6,000 decisions made by over 900 judges on 50 state supreme courts over a quarter century, Judging Inequality documents two ways that state high courts have crafted policies relevant to inequality: through substantive policy decisions that fail to advance equality and by rulings favoring more privileged litigants (typically known as “upperdogs”). The authors discover that whether court-sanctioned policies lead to greater or lesser inequality depends on the ideologies of the justices serving on these high benches, the policy preferences of their constituents (the people of their state), and the institutional structures that determine who becomes a judge as well as who decides whether those individuals remain in office. Gibson and Nelson decisively reject the conventional theory that state supreme courts tend to protect underdog litigants from the wrath of majorities. Instead, the authors demonstrate that the ideological compositions of state supreme courts most often mirror the dominant political coalition in their state at a given point in time. As a result, state supreme courts are unlikely to stand as an independent force against the rise of inequality in the United States, instead making decisions compatible with the preferences of political elites already in power. At least at the state high court level, the myth of judicial independence truly is a myth. Judging Inequality offers a comprehensive examination of the powerful role that state supreme courts play in shaping public policies pertinent to inequality. This volume is a landmark contribution to scholarly work on the intersection of American jurisprudence and inequality, one that essentially rewrites the “conventional wisdom” on the role of courts in America’s democracy.

Looks at the history of the American legal profession, discusses the effectiveness of nonlawyer judges, and considers legal education, the image of justice, judicial credentials, and professionalism

The first comprehensive account of Stalin's struggle to make criminal law in the USSR a reliable instrument of rule offers new perspectives on collectivization, the Great Terror, the politics of abortion, and the disciplining of the labor force.