In his first four years as Chief Justice of the United States, William Howard Taft convinced Congress to pass two reform bills that substantially enhanced the power of the federal courts, the Supreme Court, and the Chief Justice. In this article, I explore the causes and the consequences of those reforms. I detail how Taft’s political entrepreneurship— specifically the building of reputations, ...

In a recent issue of this Journal, Professor Abraham Goldstein and Research Fellow Martin Marcus discussed their observations about the criminal procedures of three European countries, France, Germany, and Italy, as representative of the "Continental" or "inquisitorial" model of investigation and prosecution.' Their inquiry was prompted, they said, by a desire to probe claims that in those coun...

It has been nearly a decade since Stephen Burbank and Barry Friedman edited their impressive volume, Judicial Independence at the Crossroads. One of the enduring lessons of that book was that research on judicial independence was, and ought to be, fundamentally interdisciplinary in nature. In the years since its publication, we have witnessed a substantial volume of research on the subject, and...

Criminal prosecutions of child sexual abuse alleged to have occurred in the distant past raise myriad challenges. One significant challenge involves assessing the credibility of complainants. In the present study, 51 bench trials involving 87 complainants were coded into categories related to complainants’ memory for the offense, as well as credibility of the complainant, reliability of the evi...

Abstract: In this article, I review the decisions of the appellate courts in National Labor Relations Board (“NLRB”) cases over a twenty year period, 1994 to 2014, to ascertain what political, economic and legal factors impact judicial decision making. Unlike many other analyses of appellate decision making, this study makes a deliberate effort to take into account legal and procedural differen...

The article introduces JudO, an OWL2 ontology library of legal knowledge that relies on the metadata contained in judicial documents. JudO represents the interpretations performed by a judge while conducting legal reasoning towards the adjudication of a case. To the aim of this application, judicial interpretation is intended in the restricted sense of the acts of judicial subsumption performed...

throughout the history of the islamic iran the judicial system has always been based on common law and canon law (sharī‘a). upon the formalization of shī‘ism as the official school (nadhhab) in the safavid era, the shī‘a jurisprudence was set as the basis for legal judgments; and for the execution of judicial affairs the ruler appointed officers such as ṣadr, shaykh al-islām, and other judicial...

Commenting on the California case of Elizabeth Bouvia, a quadreplegic who requested hospital assistance to alleviate suffering while she starved herself to death, Brahams expresses the hope that no patient in the United Kingdom will ever be forcibly fed against his or her wishes. Since passage of Britain's Suicide Act of 1961, taking one's own life is not a crime, although aiding a suicide is ...

The 1991 Delaware court ruling involving Credit Lyonnais expanded the fiduciary duties of managers towards debtholders in the event that a firm is within the proximity of insolvency. Using a difference-in-differences approach that exploits this exogenous shock, we find that the 1991 ruling induced managers of Delaware firms ex ante to place a greater emphasis on investments that foster long-ter...