Ensuring diversity and gender equality in judicial positions, including at senior levels, can reduce the barriers women faced accessing justice, increase their willingness to approach legal system. Improving representativeness of judiciary also support its quality, independence, impartiality integrity (OECD, 2022). Overall, ensuring a gender-balanced leadership remains key governance issue OECD...

Nations Convention against Corruption (UNCAC). Where it does not exist, pliant prosecutors, judges, and court staff may ignore criminal acts of corruption or have them improperly dismissed. Biased appointments, promotions, and disciplinary processes mean that justice sector staff may be ill-equipped to handle complex cases, including those involving corruption. The UNCAC's unique provisions for...

This is an extremely ambitious book, for in its relatively brief compass it undertakes to discuss three aspects of the Jeffersonian era: (1) the contest for control of the national judiciary, usually personified as a struggle of the titans, Thomas Jefferson and John Marshall; (2) the battle for reform of the judiciary at the state and local level; and (3) the meaning of Jeffersonian democracy a...

The judiciary needs to be independent of outside influence, particularly from political and economic powers. But judicial independence does not mean that judges and court officials should have free rein to behave as they please. Indeed, judicial independence is founded on public trust, and to maintain it, judges must uphold the highest standards of integrity. This chapter focuses on the account...

The conventional wisdom among many legal scholars is that judicial independence can best be achieved with an appointive judiciary; judicial elections turn judges into politicians, threatening judicial autonomy. Yet the original supporters of judicial elections successfully eliminated the appointive systems of many states by arguing that judges who owed their jobs to politicians could never be t...