OBJECTIVE To evaluate how the Judicial Power safeguards the social right to pharmaceutical assistance as well as the relationships between the legal and political systems to safeguard this right. METHODS There were assessed decisions in lawsuits of drug supply in the state of São Paulo, Southern Brazil, between 1997 and 2004. Discourse of the Collective Subject of procedural actors was the me...

It is common in the legal academy to describe trends in judicial decisions leading to new common law rules as the result of conscious judicial effort. Evolutionary models of litigation, in contrast, treat common law as resulting from pressure applied by litigants. One apparent difficulty in the theory of litigation is explaining how trends in judicial decisions favoring one litigant, and biasin...

In this paper, which was prepared to help set the stage at an interdisciplinary conference held at the University of Indiana (Bloomington) in March, I first briefly review what I take to be the key events and developments in the history of the study of judicial behavior in legal scholarship, with attention to corresponding developments in political science. I identify obstacles to cooperation i...

This paper examines the effect of judicial of ideology on the selection and outcome of telecommunications regulatory cases. Using a dataset on Federal Communications Commission orders and trials from 1990 to 1995, this paper shows that changes in the make-up of the bench of the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals affects not only who wins the cases, but also the cases selected for litigation. Specifi...

The search employed by judicial professionals when seeking for past similar legal decisions is known as jurisprudence research. Humans employ analogical reasoning when comparing a given actual situation with past decisions, noting the affinities between them. In the process of being reminded of a similar situation when faced to a new one, Case-Based Reasoning (CBR) systems simulate analogical r...