scholarly journals The role of case law in judicial decision-making: A sociological perspective

Sociologija ◽  
2015 ◽  
Vol 57 (4) ◽  
pp. 593-619
Author(s):  
Tilen Stajnpihler
Keyword(s):  
Decision Making ◽  
Legal Status ◽  
Case Law ◽  
The Body ◽  
Judicial Decision ◽  
Judicial Decision Making ◽  
The Supreme Court ◽  
Citation Practices ◽  
The Republic

The article attempts to verify a common conception that has by now become an integral part of legal culture in civil law jurisdictions, namely, the conception that despite its unresolved legal status, case law (i.e. the body of past judicial decisions) is widely used by the courts when they are justifying their interpretative choices. For this purpose, an exploratory empirical study of court citation practices was conducted. The study focused on a sample of the officially reported decisions of the Supreme Court of the Republic of Slovenia and the appellate (Higher) courts on civil matters in 2011 that were publicly accessible on the official internet database of the Slovene courts. The aim of the study, which provides the first systematic outline of the use of case law in the judicial decision making process within the Slovene legal system, was to verify whether case law in fact constitutes an important factor in judicial decision-making. It did so by focusing on the extent and the manner in which Slovene courts refer to case law, as these may be inferred from the reasoning of their decisions.

scholarly journals A NEW LEGAL SOLUTION ON RECIDIVISM IN SERBIАN CRIMINAL LEGISLATION

2021 ◽  
Vol 25 (3) ◽  
Author(s):  
Ivana Bodrožić ◽  
Đorđe Đorđević
Keyword(s):  
Decision Making ◽  
Criminal Law ◽  
Legal Status ◽  
General Trend ◽  
Criminal Code ◽  
Judicial Decision ◽  
Judicial Decision Making ◽  
Criminal Legislation ◽  
Persistent Offending

From the adoption of the Criminal Code in 2006 until the latest amendments of 2019, the Serbian criminal legislation treated recidivism as an optional aggravating circumstance, which had its specific legal status in comparison with other mitigating and aggravating circumstances. According to the new legal solution, instead of being optional, recidivism has become a mandatory aggravating circumstance, which together with clearly specified conditions for harsher penalties narrows down the possibility of free judicial decision-making when meting out punishment. The paper answers several questions: whether harsher penalties for recidivists are only the result of continuous tightening of repression at a normative level, whether and to what extent the criminal-law framework has been improved, and whether returning to some solutions, which were not normally applied in court practice, can be marked as approriate to achieve the desired degree of crime prevention. Final critical conculusion is that the new legal solution on recidivism appears regressive, given that the court is strictly bound by the law through oblitatory conditions regarding prior and persistent offending, which is in compliance with the general trend of tightening repression at the normative level and reducing the role of the court to the level of administrative application of the norm.

scholarly journals Decisión judicial y participación ciudadana: los impactos de las audiencias públicas en las sentencias de la Corte Suprema argentina = Judicial decision making and public participation: the impact of public hearings in the decisions of the Supreme Court of Argentina

2018 ◽  
pp. 102
Author(s):  
Miguel Á. Benedetti ◽  
M. Jimena Sáenz
Keyword(s):  
Decision Making ◽  
Public Participation ◽  
Supreme Court ◽  
Latin American ◽  
Judicial Decision ◽  
Judicial Decision Making ◽  
The Supreme Court ◽  
Public Hearings ◽  
The Impact

Resumen: En las últimas décadas, las audiencias públicas realizadas en foros judiciales han sido señaladas como una de las innovaciones más importantes en las prácticas de los tribunales de altas instancias latinoamericanos. Estas audiencias prometen una renovación en los modos de pensar las tensas relaciones entre el poder judicial –especialmente su facultad de revisión de constitucionalidad– y la democracia a partir de la apertura del espacio judicial al diálogo y la participación de la ciudadanía, de las modalidades de intervención judicial para la protección de derechos, y de los aspectos simbólicos y políticos de herramientas que usualmente se reconocen como meramente procesales. A la luz de esos objetivos de renovación dialógica, pragmática y simbólica de las prácticas judiciales que abrieron las audiencias, este trabajo testea su grado de concreción a través de un estudio de los efectos de las audiencias públicas realizadas por la Corte Suprema de Justicia argentina en sus decisiones desde finales de 2004 hasta el 2017 inclusive.Palabras clave: Corte Suprema, audiencias públicas, participación ciudadana, deliberación, decisión judicialAbstract: The implementation of public hearings in judicial fora in the last decades has been considered from different perspectives one of the most important innovations in the practices of Latin American Courts. They promise a renovation in the ways of accommodating the tension between the role of Courts (especially their function of judicial review) and democracy; in the models of judicial decision making, and they point to the symbolic dimension of procedural rules and practices. This paper presents a study that tests the accomplishment of these promises tracing the impact of public hearings in the decisions of the Supreme Court of Argentina in the period between 2004 and 2017.Keywords: Supreme Court, public hearings, public participation, deliberation, judicial decision making.  

Do Not Ignore the Elephant... Exploring the Role of Intuition and Experience in Judicial Decision-Making

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Linda Tvrdíková
Keyword(s):  
Decision Making ◽  
Legal Theory ◽  
Legal Reasoning ◽  
Normative Theory ◽  
Judicial Decision ◽  
Judicial Decision Making ◽  
Deliberative System ◽  
Experiential System ◽  
Analytical System

If we look at the literature about judicial decision-making and interpretation of law, we can find many texts which are dedicated to legal arguments, logic and legal reasoning – in those texts the rationality, analytical and logical thinking is glorified and an interpretation seems ‘just’ as a logical operation where judges subsume certain facts under general legal norm or norms, those norms are formulated linguistically, so it seems that the whole job of judges is to analyze texts. What we can see more rarely are discussions and texts exploring the role of intuitions, feelings and emotions and their role in judicial decision-making – at least in the Czech Republic. Those of our faculties are seen as the source of bias and distortion. Even if we look to the past, those themes are not so common among legal theorists and philosophers – especially in our tradition where we are still influenced by Hans Kelsen and František Weyr and their normative theory – but we can find exceptions and those are the American legal realists. In this paper, we will show that their observations and insights seem to be right. How can we know it? Because in last decades cognitive scientists have made big progress in the area of decision-making and it seems that we are not so rational as we thought us to be. They have explored that our thinking does not take place only through the deliberative system but, surprisingly, there is also another one system which influences our decisions. This system is automatic, fast, and intuitive – some call this system S1, Seymour Epstein an experiential system. This automatic system is more influential than our deliberative system because it is always heard – we can use Jonathan Haidt’s metaphor of an elephant and a rider. S1, the intuitive, experiential system, is an elephant and S2, the deliberative, analytical system is the rider – in legal theory, we have talked about the rider a lot but we do not explore the elephant sufficiently. This paper will try to uncover the nature of the elephant.

How Judges Use Weapons of Influence: The Social Psychology of Courts

2013 ◽  
Vol 46 (1) ◽  
pp. 7-24
Author(s):  
Guy Davidov ◽  
Maayan Davidov
Keyword(s):  
Social Psychology ◽  
Decision Making ◽  
Case Law ◽  
Judicial Decision ◽  
Judicial Decision Making ◽  
The Public ◽  
The Social ◽  
The Face ◽  
Decision Making Processes ◽  
The Government

Research on compliance has shown that people can be induced to comply with various requests by using techniques that capitalise on the human tendencies to act consistently and to reciprocate. Thus far this line of research has been applied to interactions between individuals, not to relations between institutions. We argue, however, that similar techniques are applied by courts vis-à-vis the government, the legislature and the public at large, when courts try to secure legitimacy and acceptance of their decisions. We discuss a number of known influence techniques – including ‘foot in the door’, ‘low-balling’, ‘giving a reputation to uphold’ and ‘door in the face’ – and provide examples from Israeli case law of the use of such techniques by courts. This analysis offers new insights that can further the understanding of judicial decision-making processes.

The European Court of Human Rights and Transnational Judicial Dialogue

ICL Journal ◽  
2015 ◽  
Vol 9 (3) ◽  
Author(s):  
Carla M Zoethout
Keyword(s):  
Decision Making ◽  
Human Rights ◽  
Case Law ◽  
Judicial Decision ◽  
Council Of Europe ◽  
Judicial Decision Making ◽  
The Past ◽  
European Court ◽  
Foreign Law ◽  
The Us

AbstractOver the past decade, the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR) seems more and more inclined to use foreign sources of law, that is to say, law that does not originate in the Convention itself or in one of the Member States of the Council of Europe. Unlike in the US, there is little discussion in Europe about this form of judicial dialogue in the case-law of the ECtHR. This paper seeks both to clarify transnational dialogue by the ECtHR and find ways to justify this practice, against the backdrop of the American debate on this topic. First, the concept of transnational judicial dialogue is analysed (Part II). Then judicial dialogue as it presents itself in the judgments of the ECtHR is assessed, especially when non-Convention or foreign law is being used in a substantive way (Part III). Subsequently, an attempt is made to define when and why the use of foreign law by the ECtHR can be considered a justifiable approach in judicial decision-making (Part IV). The paper rounds off with some concluding remarks (Part V).

Expertise Fails to Attenuate Gendered Biases in Judicial Decision-Making

2018 ◽  
Vol 10 (2) ◽  
pp. 227-234 ◽  
Author(s):  
Andrea L. Miller
Keyword(s):  
Decision Making ◽  
Gender Ideology ◽  
Controlled Experiments ◽  
Judicial Decision ◽  
Trial Court ◽  
Judicial Decision Making ◽  
Legal Decision Making ◽  
Subject Matter Expertise ◽  
Relative Differences

Although the influence of gender ideology on lay decision-making has been established, it is not known to what extent expertise may mitigate gendered biases and improve decision-making quality. In a set of controlled experiments, trial court judges and laypeople evaluated a hypothetical child custody case and a hypothetical employment discrimination case. The role of expertise was tested in two ways: by comparing judges’ and laypeople’s decision-making and by examining relative differences in expertise among judges. Judges were no less influenced by litigant gender and by their own gender ideology than the lay sample. Judges with greater subject-matter expertise were also no less influenced by gender ideology than other judges. In some cases, expertise was associated with greater, not less, bias. The results of this study suggest that expertise does not attenuate gendered biases in legal decision-making.

Law and American Political Development

2008 ◽  
Vol 33 (03) ◽  
pp. 779-803 ◽  
Author(s):  
Paul Frymer
Keyword(s):  
Decision Making ◽  
Political Development ◽  
American Politics ◽  
Political Change ◽  
American Political Development ◽  
State Building ◽  
Institutional Autonomy ◽  
Judicial Decision ◽  
Judicial Decision Making ◽  
The Supreme Court

This essay reviews the recent volume edited by Ronald Kahn and Ken I. Kersch, The Supreme Court and American Political Development(2006), as well as the broader literature by law scholars interested in American Political Development (APD). The Law and APD literature has advanced our knowledge about courts by placing attention on the importance of executive and legislative actors, and by providing political context to our understanding of judicial decision making. But this knowledge would be more powerful if it would embrace the broader APD field's orientation toward the importance of state and institutional autonomy for understanding politics and political change. Law and APD scholars could go further in examining the ways in which courts and judges act institutionally, and how the legal branch as an institution impacts American politics and state-building. In doing so, Law and APD scholars would contribute not only to our understanding of judicial decision making but also to our understanding of the place and importance of courts in American politics.

Traumatic Experiences and Juvenile Amenability: The Role of Trauma in Forensic Evaluations and Judicial Decision Making

2010 ◽  
Vol 40 (5) ◽  
pp. 363-380 ◽  
Author(s):  
Christina L. Riggs Romaine ◽  
Naomi E. Sevin Goldstein ◽  
Elizabeth Hunt ◽  
David DeMatteo
Keyword(s):  
Decision Making ◽  
Traumatic Experiences ◽  
Judicial Decision ◽  
Judicial Decision Making ◽  
Forensic Evaluations

Law in Judicial Decision-Making

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
David Klein
Keyword(s):  
Decision Making ◽  
Judicial Decision ◽  
Judicial Decision Making ◽  
Theoretical Inquiry ◽  
New Strategy

Years of effort by many talented and creative scholars to gauge the influence of law on judicial decision-making have produced payoffs, but the payoffs do not seem commensurate with the work that has gone into producing them. After reviewing some of the most important approaches and findings, this chapter identifies key obstacles to progress and suggests a new strategy for making more headway against them. The strategy begins by recognizing that ultimately the questions driving empirical and theoretical inquiry into law’s influence are often less about law itself than about the propriety of judicial decision-making. The chapter concludes with suggestions for empirical questions to complement more familiar ones about the role of law in judges’ decisions.

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