Law Ideology And Collegiality

In a ground-breaking study on the nature of judicial behaviour in the Supreme Court of Canada, Donald Songer, Susan Johnson, C.L. Ostberg, and Matthew Wetstein use three specific research strategies to consider the ways in which justices seek to make decisions grounded in "good law" and to show how these decisions are shaped within a collegial court. The authors use confidential interviews with Supreme Court justices, analysis of their rulings from 1970 to 2005, and measures that tap their perceived ideological tendencies to provide a critical examination of the ideological roots of judicial decision making, uncovering the complexity of contemporary judicial behaviour. Examining judicial behaviour through the lens of three different research strategies grounded in qualitative and quantitative methodologies,Law, Ideology, and Collegialitypresents compelling evidence that political ideology is a key factor in decision making and a prominent source of conflict in the Supreme Court of Canada.

Revealing analysis of how judges work as individuals and collectively to uphold judicial values in the face of contemporary challenges.

This collection adopts a distinctive method and structure to introduce the work of Italian constitutional law scholars into the Anglophone dialogue while also bringing a number of prominent non-Italian constitutional law scholars to study and write about constitutional justice in a global context. The work presents six distinct areas of particular interest from a comparative constitutional perspective: first, the role of legal scholarship in the work of constitutional courts; second, structures and processes that contribute to more “open” or “closed” styles of constitutional adjudication; third, pros and cons of collegiality in the work of constitutional courts; fourth, forms of access by individuals to constitutional justice; fifth, methods of constitutional interpretation; and sixth, the relationship between national constitutional adjudication and the transnational context. In each of these six areas, the volume sets up a new and genuine constitutional dialogue between an Italian scholar presenting a discussion and critical assessment of the specific topic, and a non-Italian scholar who responds elaborating the issue as seen from constitutional law beyond the Italian system. The resulting six such dialogues thus provide a dynamic, in-depth, multidimensional, national and transnational/comparative examination of these areas in which the `Italian style’ of constitutional adjudication has a distinctive contribution to make to comparative constitutional law in general. Fostering a deeper knowledge of the Italian Constitutional Court within the comparative global space and advancing a creative and fruitful methodological approach, the book will be fascinating reading for academics and researchers in comparative constitutional law.

This original book fills a significant gap in legal literature by providing an exploration of research methodologies in public law; a field of research in which research methods are becoming increasingly prominent and sophisticated. Featuring thoughtful chapters written by leading scholars in the field, this book provides a thorough explanation of the key features, characteristics, and challenges of distinct methodological approaches to public law research.

Judicial decision-making may ideally be impartial, but in reality it is influenced by many different factors, including institutional context, ideological commitment, fellow justices on a panel, and personal preference. Empirical literature in this area increasingly analyzes this complex collection of factors in isolation, when a larger sample size of comparative institutional contexts can help assess the impact of the procedures, norms, and rules on key institutional decisions, such as how appeals are decided. Four basic institutional questions from a comparative perspective help address these studies regardless of institutional context or government framework. Who decides, or how is a justice appointed? How does an appeal reach the court; what processes occur? Who is before the court, or how do the characteristics of the litigants and third parties affect judicial decision-making? How does the court decide the appeal, or what institutional norms and strategic behaviors do the judges perform to obtain their preferred outcome? This book explains how the answers to these institutional questions largely determine the influence of political preferences of individual judges and the degree of cooperation among judges at a given point in time. The authors apply these four fundamental institutional questions to empirical work on the Supreme Courts of the US, UK, Canada, India, and the High Court of Australia. The ultimate purpose of this book is to promote a deeper understanding of how institutional differences affect judicial decision-making, using empirical studies of supreme courts in countries with similar basic structures but with sufficient differences to enable meaningful comparison.

Gerald Le Dain (1924–2007) was appointed to the Supreme Court of Canada in 1984. This collectively written biography traces fifty years of his steady, creative, and conciliatory involvement with military service, the legal academy, legislative reform, university administration, and judicial decision-making. This book assembles contributions from the in-house historian of the law firm where Le Dain first practised, from students and colleagues in the law schools where he taught, from a research associate in his Commission of Inquiry into the non-medical use of drugs, from two of his successors on the Federal Court of Appeal, and from three judicial clerks to Le Dain at the Supreme Court of Canada. Also reproduced here is a transcript of a recent CBC documentary about his 1988 forced resignation from the Supreme Court following a short-term depressive illness, with commentary from Le Dain’s family and co-workers. Gerald Le Dain was a tireless worker and a highly respected judge. In a series of essays that cover the different periods and dimensions of his career, Tracings of Gerald Le Dain’s Life in the Law is an important and compassionate account of one man's commitment to the law in Canada. Contributors include Harry W. Arthurs, G. Blaine Baker, Bonnie Brown, Rosemary Cairns-Way, John M. Evans, Melvyn Green, Bernard J. Hibbitts, Peter W. Hogg, Richard A. Janda, C. Ian Kyer, Andree Lajoie, Gerald E. Le Dain, Allen M. Linden, Roderick A. Macdonald, Louise Rolland, and Stephen A. Scott.

For centuries, courts across the common law world have developed systems of law by building bodies of judicial decisions. In deciding individual cases, common law courts settle litigation and move the law in new directions. By virtue of their place at the top of the judicial hierarchy, courts at the apex of common law systems are unique in that their decisions and, in particular, the language used in those decisions, resonate through the legal system. Although both the common law and apex courts have been studied extensively, scholars have paid less attention to the relationship between the two. By analyzing apex courts and the common law from multiple angles, this book offers an entry point for scholars in disciplines related to law – such as political science, history, and sociology – who are seeking a deeper understanding and new insights as to how the common law applies to and is relevant within their own disciplines.

In Jurisprudence as Ideology, Valerie Kerruish asks how it is that people who are put down, let down and kept down by law can be thought to have a general political obligation to obey it. She engages with contemporary issues in socialist, feminist and critical legal theory, and links these issues to debates in jurisprudence and the philosophy and sociology of law.