A hard look at common law administrative tribunals

This paper looks at common law administrative tribunals. For legal-historical reasons, these bodies are located at the bottom of the judicial hierarchy or outside of it; its adjudicators often have less training, formal protections and resources than judges of the general court system, yet are required to handle a huge caseload. One difficulty is that administrative tribunals are often not part of the litigation data, skewing statistics. Another difficulty is more substantive: it makes sense for “lower courts” to be assigned cases traditionally considered less legally complicated and overall “less important”; yet common law administrative tribunals often deal with highly complex, socially sensitive legal issues with major potential consequences for litigants’ rights such as bankruptcy, immigration or welfare. Not only should common law administrative tribunals be fully counted in court data, but they should also receive more resources and sufficient judicial oversight to ensure their good operation and litigants’ rights.

Penerapan Peradilan Adat Berbasis Kuasi Yudisial Dalam Memutus Sengketa Adat

The customary court is not a judicial institution that can decide a dispute with the direction of justice as in the national court so that recognition of customary decisions does not get permanent legal force which results in legal uncertainty in dispute resolution through customary court institutions. Thus, there is an idea that is offered in this research that implements customary courts as quasi-judicial in resolving customary disputes. Through normative juridical research, it is found that: first, the position of customary courts is only limited to deliberative dispute resolution, and in the judicial hierarchy its position is not recognized. Second, the quasi-judicial model that can be applied in customary courts can emulate KPPU in deciding disputes where to obtain permanent legal force, the KPPU's decision needs to be ruled by a district court, and if some object to the verdict, they can file an objection legal remedy in the domestic court. a period of 14 days from receipt of the decision on the parties.

The Place of the Employment Court in the New Zealand Judicial Hierarchy

This article considers the status of the Employment Court and its position in the overall court structure in New Zealand. It examines the issue from both an historical and comparative New Zealand legal perspective.

Competing signals in the judicial hierarchy

Political principals often face information deficits. This is especially true of the US judicial hierarchy; extant theories of ideological monitoring in this setting have therefore explored informational cues such as lower court ideology or dissent. Canonical models of this setting, however, have omitted litigants, implicity assuming they are not an important source of information. This paper develops a formal model that considers whether litigants can credibly signal information about noncompliance, and how litigants’ signals interact with the cues of ideology and dissent. The model shows that litigant signals can be highly informative about doctrinal compliance, sometimes even crowding out the need for other signals. By contrast, litigants face difficulty communicating information about case importance; dissent, however, can be highly informative on this dimension. Accordingly, some informational cues may only influence limited aspects of the high court’s case selection process.

Patronal politics, judicial networks and collective judicial autonomy in post-Soviet Ukraine

How and why do networks of judges make a difference in judicial politics in patronage-based systems? Judicial networks provide important benefits to both patrons and judges by sharing information about the exchange of concrete rewards and sanctions, generating expectations about the staying power of the patrons and mobilizing judges when needed. These informational and mobilizing practices are at the heart of collective judicial autonomy. Yet judges exercise this autonomy in different ways depending on the presence of a dominant patronage network, the rigidity of the judicial hierarchy with the supreme court on top, and the intensity of intra-judicial conflict. I explore the informational and mobilizing practices of judicial associations – the most visible judicial networks – in post-Soviet Ukraine, a country with a large number of these associations, varying numbers of ruling patronage networks and two attempts at the abolition of the supreme court. Lessons from Ukraine’s judicial clientelism may help explain why competitive politics with vibrant judicial associationalism fail to entrench judicial independence.