Reputation And Judicial Tactics

This book argues that national and international courts seek to enhance their reputations through the strategic exercise of judicial power. Courts often cannot enforce their judgments and must rely on reputational sanctions to ensure compliance. One way to do this is for courts to improve their reputation for generating compliance with their judgments. When the court's reputation is increased, parties will be expected to comply with its judgments and the reputational sanction on a party that fails to comply will be higher. This strategy allows national and international courts, which cannot enforce their judgments against states and executives, to improve the likelihood that their judgments will be complied with over time. This book describes the judicial tactics that courts use to shape their judgments in ways that maximize their reputational gains.

This book argues that national and international courts seek to enhance their reputations through the strategic exercise of judicial power. Courts often cannot enforce their judgments and must rely on reputational sanctions to ensure compliance. One way to do this is for courts to improve their reputation for generating compliance with their judgments. When the court's reputation is increased, parties will be expected to comply with its judgments and the reputational sanction on a party that fails to comply will be higher. This strategy allows national and international courts, which cannot enforce their judgments against states and executives, to improve the likelihood that their judgments will be complied with over time. This book describes the judicial tactics that courts use to shape their judgments in ways that maximize their reputational gains.

This book argues that national and international courts seek to enhance their reputations through the strategic exercise of judicial power. Courts often cannot enforce their judgments and must rely on reputational sanctions to ensure compliance. One way to do this is for courts to improve their reputation for generating compliance with their judgments. When the court's reputation is increased, parties will be expected to comply with its judgments and the reputational sanction on a party that fails to comply will be higher. This strategy allows national and international courts, which cannot enforce their judgments against states and executives, to improve the likelihood that their judgments will be complied with over time. This book describes the judicial tactics that courts use to shape their judgments in ways that maximize their reputational gains.

In Strategies of Compliance with the European Court of Human Rights, Andreas von Staden looks at the nature of human rights challenges in two enduring liberal democracies—Germany and the United Kingdom. Employing an ambitious data set that covers the compliance status of all European Court of Human Rights judgments rendered until 2015, von Staden presents a cross-national overview of compliance that illustrates a strong correlation between the quality of a country's democracy and the rate at which judgments have met compliance. Tracing the impact of violations in Germany and the United Kingdom specifically, he details how governments, legislators, and domestic judges responded to the court's demands for either financial compensation or changes to laws, policies, and practices. Framing his analysis in the context of the long-standing international relations debate between rationalists who argue that actions are dictated by an actor's preferences and cost-benefit calculations, and constructivists, who emphasize the influence of norms on behavior, von Staden argues that the question of whether to comply with a judgment needs to be analyzed separately from the question of how to comply. According to von Staden, constructivist reasoning best explains why Germany and the United Kingdom are motivated to comply with the European Court of Human Rights judgments, while rationalist reasoning in most cases accounts for how these countries bring their laws, policies, and practices into sufficient compliance for their cases to be closed. When complying with adverse decisions while also exploiting all available options to minimize their domestic impact, liberal democracies are thus both norm-abiding and rational-instrumentalist at the same time—in other words, they choose their compliance strategies rationally within the normative constraint of having to comply with the Court's judgments.

This book examines the jurisprudence of the Supreme Court of Ireland since its creation in 1924. It sets out the origins of the Court, explains how it operated during the life of the Irish Free State (1922-1937), and considers how it has developed various fields of law under Ireland's 1937 Constitution, especially after the 're-creation' of the Court in 1961. As well as constitutional law, the book looks at the Court's views on the status and legal system of Northern Ireland, administrative law, criminal justice and personal and family law. There are also chapters on the Supreme Court's interaction with European Union law and with the European Convention on Human Rights. The argument throughout is that, while the Court has been well served by many of its judges, who on occasion have manifested a healthy degree of judicial activism, there are still several legal fields in which the Court has not developed its jurisprudence as clearly or as imaginatively as it might have done. It has often displayed undue conservatism and deference. For many years its performance was hampered by its extreme workload, generated by its inability to control the number of appeals brought to it. However, the creation of a new Court of Appeal in 2014 has freed up the Supreme Court to act in a manner more analogous to that adopted by supreme courts in other common law countries. The Court's future looks bright.

Have Canadian women gained from their pursuit of legal remedies to social, political, economic, and cultural inequalities? Is law a fruitful avenue for such struggles? Using liberal feminist, postmodern, critical, race, and queer theory, these essays confront the anti-rights critiques of the legal Left regarding the use of law in general and the Charter in particular. Several chapters explicitly examine the strategic limits and possibilities of the substantive equality rights approaches pursued by LEAF (The Women's Legal Education and Action Fund). Others focus on legal strategies mobilized in discreet areas of law and public policy by foreign domestic workers and racialized women, lesbians, women seeking reproductive freedom, women in the childcare movement, and anti-violence advocates. Recognizing the diversity of women across class, citizenship, race and ethnicity, sexual identity, culture, and (dis)ability, this collection evaluates the efficacy of the wide range of legal and political strategies women have employed, particularly in this post-Charter era. Women's Legal Strategies in Canada is the most comprehensive account of these important issues and will surely become the standard work in the field.