Download or read book How Judges Judge written by Brian M. Barry and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2020-11-26 with total page 361 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A judge’s role is to make decisions. This book is about how judges undertake this task. It is about forces on the judicial role and their consequences, about empirical research from a variety of academic disciplines that observes and verifies how factors can affect how judges judge. On the one hand, judges decide by interpreting and applying the law, but much more affects judicial decision-making: psychological effects, group dynamics, numerical reasoning, biases, court processes, influences from political and other institutions, and technological advancement. All can have a bearing on judicial outcomes. In How Judges Judge: Empirical Insights into Judicial Decision-Making, Brian M. Barry explores how these factors, beyond the law, affect judges in their role. Case examples, judicial rulings, judges’ own self-reflections on their role and accounts from legal history complement this analysis to contextualise the research, make it more accessible and enrich the reader’s understanding and appreciation of judicial decision-making. Offering research-based insights into how judges make the decisions that can impact daily life and societies around the globe, this book will be of interest to practising and training judges, litigation lawyers and those studying law and related disciplines.

Download or read book How Judges Think written by Richard A. Posner and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2010-05-01 with total page 399 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A distinguished and experienced appellate court judge, Richard A. Posner offers in this new book a unique and, to orthodox legal thinkers, a startling perspective on how judges and justices decide cases. When conventional legal materials enable judges to ascertain the true facts of a case and apply clear pre-existing legal rules to them, Posner argues, they do so straightforwardly; that is the domain of legalist reasoning. However, in non-routine cases, the conventional materials run out and judges are on their own, navigating uncharted seas with equipment consisting of experience, emotions, and often unconscious beliefs. In doing so, they take on a legislative role, though one that is confined by internal and external constraints, such as professional ethics, opinions of respected colleagues, and limitations imposed by other branches of government on freewheeling judicial discretion. Occasional legislators, judges are motivated by political considerations in a broad and sometimes a narrow sense of that term. In that open area, most American judges are legal pragmatists. Legal pragmatism is forward-looking and policy-based. It focuses on the consequences of a decision in both the short and the long term, rather than on its antecedent logic. Legal pragmatism so understood is really just a form of ordinary practical reasoning, rather than some special kind of legal reasoning. Supreme Court justices are uniquely free from the constraints on ordinary judges and uniquely tempted to engage in legislative forms of adjudication. More than any other court, the Supreme Court is best understood as a political court.

Download or read book Judicial Decision Making written by Barry Friedman and published by West Academic Publishing. This book was released on 2020-04-27 with total page 966 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book is the only comprehensive treatment of judicial decision-making that combines social science with a sophisticated understanding of law and legal institutions. It is designed for everyone from undergraduates to law students and graduate students. Topics include whether the identity of the judge matters in deciding a case, how different types of lawyers and litigants shape the work of judges, how judges follow or defy the decisions of higher courts, how judges bargain with one another on multi-member courts, how judges get and keep their jobs, and how the judicial branch interacts with the other branches of government and the general public. The book explains how these individual and institutional features affect who wins and loses cases, and how the law itself is changed. It is built around well-known and accessible disputes such as gay marriage, women's rights, Obamacare, and the death penalty; and it offers students a new way to think about familiar legal issues and demonstrates how legal and social-science perspectives can produce a better understanding of courts and judges.

Download or read book Reflections on Judging written by Richard A. Posner and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2013-10-07 with total page 423 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Reflections on Judging, Richard Posner distills the experience of his thirty-one years as a judge of the United States Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit. Surveying how the judiciary has changed since his 1981 appointment, he engages the issues at stake today, suggesting how lawyers should argue cases and judges decide them, how trials can be improved, and, most urgently, how to cope with the dizzying pace of technological advance that makes litigation ever more challenging to judges and lawyers. For Posner, legal formalism presents one of the main obstacles to tackling these problems. Formalist judges--most notably Justice Antonin Scalia--needlessly complicate the legal process by advocating "canons of constructions" (principles for interpreting statutes and the Constitution) that are confusing and self-contradictory. Posner calls instead for a renewed commitment to legal realism, whereby a good judge gathers facts, carefully considers context, and comes to a sensible conclusion that avoids inflicting collateral damage on other areas of the law. This, Posner believes, was the approach of the jurists he most admires and seeks to emulate: Oliver Wendell Holmes, Louis Brandeis, Benjamin Cardozo, Learned Hand, Robert Jackson, and Henry Friendly, and it is an approach that can best resolve our twenty-first-century legal disputes.

Download or read book Good Judgment written by Robert J. Sharpe and published by University of Toronto Press. This book was released on 2018-10-11 with total page 351 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Good Judgment, based upon the author's experience as a lawyer, law professor, and judge, explores the role of the judge and the art of judging. Engaging with the American, English, and Commonwealth literature on the role of the judge in the common law tradition, Good Judgment addresses the following questions: What exactly do judges do? What is properly within their role and what falls outside? How do judges approach their decision-making task? In an attempt to explain and reconcile two fundamental features of judging, namely judicial choice and judicial discipline, this book explores the nature and extent of judicial choice in the common law legal tradition and the structural features of that tradition that control and constrain that element of choice. As Sharpe explains, the law does not always provide clear answers, and judges are often left with difficult choices to make, but the power of judicial choice is disciplined and constrained and judges are not free to decide cases according to their own personal sense of justice. Although Good Judgment is accessibly written to appeal to the non-specialist reader with an interest in the judicial process, it also tackles fundamental issues about the nature of law and the role of the judge and will be of particular interest to lawyers, judges, law students, and legal academics.

Download or read book The Behavior of Federal Judges written by Lee Epstein and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2013-01-07 with total page 491 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Judges play a central role in the American legal system, but their behavior as decision-makers is not well understood, even among themselves. The system permits judges to be quite secretive (and most of them are), so indirect methods are required to make sense of their behavior. Here, a political scientist, an economist, and a judge work together to construct a unified theory of judicial decision-making. Using statistical methods to test hypotheses, they dispel the mystery of how judicial decisions in district courts, circuit courts, and the Supreme Court are made. The authors derive their hypotheses from a labor-market model, which allows them to consider judges as they would any other economic actors: as self-interested individuals motivated by both the pecuniary and non-pecuniary aspects of their work. In the authors' view, this model describes judicial behavior better than either the traditional “legalist” theory, which sees judges as automatons who mechanically apply the law to the facts, or the current dominant theory in political science, which exaggerates the ideological component in judicial behavior. Ideology does figure into decision-making at all levels of the federal judiciary, the authors find, but its influence is not uniform. It diminishes as one moves down the judicial hierarchy from the Supreme Court to the courts of appeals to the district courts. As The Behavior of Federal Judges demonstrates, the good news is that ideology does not extinguish the influence of other components in judicial decision-making. Federal judges are not just robots or politicians in robes.

Download or read book Model Code of Judicial Conduct written by American Bar Association and published by American Bar Association. This book was released on 2007 with total page 212 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book How Do Judges Decide written by Cassia Spohn and published by SAGE. This book was released on 2009 with total page 377 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How are sentences for Federal, State, and Local crimes determined in the United States? Is this process fairly and justly applied to all concerned? How have reforms affected the process over the last 25 years? This text for advanced undergraduate students in criminal justice programs seeks to answer these questions.

Download or read book Judges and Their Audiences written by Lawrence Baum and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2009-01-10 with total page 246 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: What motivates judges as decision makers? Political scientist Lawrence Baum offers a new perspective on this crucial question, a perspective based on judges' interest in the approval of audiences important to them. The conventional scholarly wisdom holds that judges on higher courts seek only to make good law, good policy, or both. In these theories, judges are influenced by other people only in limited ways, in consequence of their legal and policy goals. In contrast, Baum argues that the influence of judges' audiences is pervasive. This influence derives from judges' interest in popularity and respect, a motivation central to most people. Judges care about the regard of audiences because they like that regard in itself, not just as a means to other ends. Judges and Their Audiences uses research in social psychology to make the case that audiences shape judges' choices in substantial ways. Drawing on a broad range of scholarship on judicial decision-making and an array of empirical evidence, the book then analyzes the potential and actual impact of several audiences, including the public, other branches of government, court colleagues, the legal profession, and judges' social peers. Engagingly written, this book provides a deeper understanding of key issues concerning judicial behavior on which scholars disagree, identifies aspects of judicial behavior that diverge from the assumptions of existing models, and shows how those models can be strengthened.

Download or read book The Judge the Judiciary and the Court written by Gabrielle Appleby and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2021-04-29 with total page 341 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Revealing analysis of how judges work as individuals and collectively to uphold judicial values in the face of contemporary challenges.

Download or read book How Do Judges Decide written by Cassia Spohn and published by SAGE. This book was released on 2002-01-28 with total page 356 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The appropriate amount of punishment for a given crime is an issue that has been debated by scholars, philosophers and legal professionals since the beginning of civilizations. This book seeks to address this issue in all of its complexity by providing a comprehensive overview of the sentencing process in the United States. The book begins by discussing the overall concept of punishment and then proceeds to dissect individual aspects of punishment. Topics include: the sentencing process; responsibility of the judge; disparity and discrimination in sentencing; and sentencing reform. This book is an ideal text for introductory courses on the judicial system, criminal law, law and society. It can be an essential resource to help students understand patterns in the wide discretion and latitude given to judges when determining punishments within the framework of the United States judicial system.

Download or read book The Psychology of Judicial Decision Making written by David E. Klein and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2010-02-08 with total page 355 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Over the years, psychologists have devoted uncountable hours to learning how human beings make judgments and decisions. As much progress as scholars have made in explaining what judges do over the past few decades, there remains a certain lack of depth to our understanding. Even where scholars can make consensual and successful predictions of a judge's behavior, they will often disagree sharply about exactly what happens in the judge's mind to generate the predicted result. This volume of essays examines the psychological processes that underlie judicial decision making.

Download or read book Judges Against Justice written by Hans Petter Graver and published by Springer. This book was released on 2014-09-11 with total page 297 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book explores concrete situations in which judges are faced with a legislature and an executive that consciously and systematically discard the ideals of the rule of law. It revolves around three basic questions: What happen when states become oppressive and the judiciary contributes to the oppression? How can we, from a legal point of view, evaluate the actions of judges who contribute to oppression? And, thirdly, how can we understand their participation from a moral point of view and support their inclination to resist?

Download or read book Judging Statutes written by Robert A. Katzmann and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2014-08-14 with total page 184 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In an ideal world, the laws of Congress--known as federal statutes--would always be clearly worded and easily understood by the judges tasked with interpreting them. But many laws feature ambiguous or even contradictory wording. How, then, should judges divine their meaning? Should they stick only to the text? To what degree, if any, should they consult aids beyond the statutes themselves? Are the purposes of lawmakers in writing law relevant? Some judges, such as Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia, believe courts should look to the language of the statute and virtually nothing else. Chief Judge Robert A. Katzmann of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit respectfully disagrees. In Judging Statutes, Katzmann, who is a trained political scientist as well as a judge, argues that our constitutional system charges Congress with enacting laws; therefore, how Congress makes its purposes known through both the laws themselves and reliable accompanying materials should be respected. He looks at how the American government works, including how laws come to be and how various agencies construe legislation. He then explains the judicial process of interpreting and applying these laws through the demonstration of two interpretative approaches, purposivism (focusing on the purpose of a law) and textualism (focusing solely on the text of the written law). Katzmann draws from his experience to show how this process plays out in the real world, and concludes with some suggestions to promote understanding between the courts and Congress. When courts interpret the laws of Congress, they should be mindful of how Congress actually functions, how lawmakers signal the meaning of statutes, and what those legislators expect of courts construing their laws. The legislative record behind a law is in truth part of its foundation, and therefore merits consideration.

Download or read book Judicial Reputation written by Nuno Garoupa and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2015-11-20 with total page 286 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In "Judicial Reputation: A Comparative Theory, "Tom Ginsburg and Nuno Garoupa mean to explain how judges respond to the reputational incentives provided by the different audiences they interact with--lawyers and law professors; politicians; the media; and the public itself--as well as how legal systems design their judicial institutions to calibrate the locally appropriate balance among audiences. Making use by turns of careful empirical work and penetrating conceptual insights, Ginsburg and Garoupa argue that any given judicial structure is best understood not through the lens of legal culture, origin, or tradition, but through the economics of information and reputation.

Download or read book Judges on Judging written by David M. O′Brien and published by CQ Press. This book was released on 2016-05-20 with total page 337 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Thoroughly revised and updated for this Fifth Edition, Judges on Judging offers insights into the judicial philosophies and political views of those on the bench. Broad in scope, this one-of-a-kind book features "off-the-bench" writings and speeches in which Supreme Court justices, as well as lower federal and state court judges, discuss the judicial process, constitutional interpretation, judicial federalism, and the role of the judiciary. Engaging introductory material provides students with necessary thematic and historical context making this book the perfect supplement to present a nuanced view of the judiciary. "Judges on Judging is consistently rated by my students as their favorite book in my class. No other single volume provides them with such a clear and accessible sense of what judges do, what courts do, and the way judges think about their roles and their courts." —Douglas Edlin, Dickinson College

Download or read book A Judge s Advice written by Ruggero J. Aldisert and published by . This book was released on 2011 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book has one objective in mind: to enrich the skills of lawyers and law students so that each may bear--to borrow from Izaak Walton's The Compleat Angler--the noble title of "compleat lawyer." The voice belongs to a nonagenarian who has rolled up his sleeves, sat back in his chair and said he is willing to share observations on the law--both its anatomy and philosophical purposes--based on his rather prodigious and extensive experience. The content includes selective reflections from Judge Aldisert's books, lectures and essays over 14 years as a lawyer and 50 years as a judge, teacher and author. Five major law themes have commanded his special interest over the years: the common law tradition, logic and law, the institutional crisis facing appellate courts, quality writing, and the judicial process. Lawyers and law students will be afforded answers to these queries: What is the bedrock of our common law system and how can I use that knowledge to better advocate? What are trial and appellate judges really looking for? How can I create a writing structure that will persuade? What is the logical configuration that is absolutely necessary in any legal argument? What practical challenges do judges face when deciding my case? Howdo I convince a judge to decide my way when no precedent controls and the law is not clear? For a lawyer in the courtroom to become a truly compleat lawyer, he or she must learn "Why am I doing what I do?" And that's what this book is all about. "[N]o other single volume that I am aware of so neatly and clearly explains the American legal system. This book explains stare decisis better than anything else available. Judge Aldisert writes about his particular passion -- the law -- with an enthusiasm that is almost exhausting. Through this book the law student can get a glimpse of just how enormously satisfying the next 60 or 70 years of his or her life can be....This book really should be required reading for all law students, lawyers and others too." -- Paul Lomio, library director and law lecturer at Stanford Law School