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This chapter examines changes in the kinds of American legal issues that have attracted international attention since the end of the Cold War and looks at the extent to which they have resulted in higher levels or new forms of foreign participation and interest in Supreme Court cases. Suggesting that these changes may have an impact, at least indirectly, on the Court in ways not adequately explored in the existing literature, it considers their possible effects on its decisions and the way that the justices consider their role within increasingly globalized legal networks.

Opinion polls show that contributions to judicial candidates create an appearance of corruption. This perception damages the institutional legitimacy of the courts. This chapter explores the relationship between integrity ratings of Illinois trial judges and campaign contributions. Specifically, it examines the Illinois State Bar Association judicial poll integrity scores of 253 elected judges seated in 101 Illinois counties during 1994–2012. Regression analysis reveals that judicial candidates’ integrity scores declined as (a) the amount of attorney contributions increased; (b) the number of reported attorney contributors enlarged; and (c) the number of large attorney contributors grew. This chapter also discusses the efficacy and limitations of four policies meant to diminish the appearance of corruption: recusal and disqualification rules; anonymous contributions; public financing; and the elimination of the election of judges. Although a radical solution, the policy of abolishing judicial elections is more likely to overcome the appearance of corruption than the other reforms.

Undergraduate legal studies classrooms are ideal places in which to engage discourses on judging, and to invite students to analyze and understand contemporary cultural and political representations of the proper roles of judges and judging in democracies. This chapter examines undergraduate understandings of judicial independence and judicial activism, via class discussions surrounding the judicial retention election in Iowa in 2010. The election was occasioned by the groundbreaking state supreme court case Varnum et al. v. Brien (2009), legalizing same-sex marriage in the state. Drawing on participant–observation research as a professor in these courses, and examining student dialogue, class discussion, and web-board postings on the topic, I find that legal studies students are able to articulate a complex range of views regarding the judiciary, judicial activism, and same-sex marriage. Their ability to engage in (mostly) civil discourse on the topic of judging is of particular societal importance, given the limitations of contemporary public discourses about judging. These findings point, as well, to the potential role for engaged academics in expanding and contextualizing public conversations about judicial independence, judicial activism, and rights. The chapter also highlights, however, limits in that educational experience, in particular students' lionization of legal processes, simultaneous to their cynicism about, and lack of engagement in, electoral/political processes. This points to the development of interdisciplinary legal studies curricula as a means toward effective education for democracy.

Following in the footsteps of critics of the 1920s and 1930s, Caleb Foote's 1954 study of the bail system in Philadelphia set the agenda for bail reform in the United States focusing on judicial discretion and the inequities of a predominantly financially based pretrial detention system. This article argues that the bail reform movement originating in the 1960s fell short of its objectives in its failure to engage judges in the business of reform. From Foote's study on, Philadelphia has played a role historically in studies of bail, detention, and reform. The article considers the experience of Philadelphia's judicial pretrial release guidelines innovation from the 1980s to the present and its implications as an important contemporary bail reform strategy in addressing the problems of bail, release, and detention practices. The implications of the judge-centered pretrial release guidelines strategy for addressing pretrial release problems in urban state court systems are discussed in light of the original aims and issues of early bail reform.

In this chapter I discuss judicial contributions to Italian penality. I look at the penal incentives produced by interactions between judicial and political classes, and ask whether judges and prosecutors have been forces for punitiveness or moderation. I discuss the relevance of the Italian case for broader analyses of Western penality.

My chapter offers a political-sociological account of judicial contributions to punishment. I analyse the penal incentives created by different national institutional set-ups, specifically addressing judicial contributions to penality using a framework developed by Joachim Savelsberg and Nicola Lacey. The framework examines judicial structure in the institutional context looking at the penal implications of bureaucratisation of the judiciary and the capacity for co-ordination between judges and politicians. I include judicial legitimacy as an additional dimension in this framework.

I conclude that the Italian judiciary have been forces for punitiveness and moderation. Their contributions can be systematised by looking at the waxing and waning of judicial legitimacy, and the consequent expansion and contraction of judicial powers. I claim that judicial legitimacy is also relevant to other (‘non-Italian’) analyses of judicial contributions to contemporary Western penality.

By adding legitimacy to investigations of judicial contributions to penality I provide an organising principle with which to analyse the penal role of Italian judicial actors. I thus allow Italy to be kept in conversation with existing comparative models, without assuming that it either conforms to the models entirely, or that the models should otherwise be eschewed. I use the Italian case to demonstrate the relevance of legitimacy when analysing judicial contributions to Western penality, arguing that changing legitimacy affects the terms and effect of interaction between judicial and political classes.

The profession of judicial advisory is a profession with a larger scope, which creates solutions for legal problems by harmoniously blending principles, theories, and standards that relate to many areas of expertise such as accounting, auditing, and law. The legists need expert information on the matters of accounting, finance, and taxation regarding the files that they handle. In such cases, experts who perform the profession of judicial advisory provide their consultancy services to the legists before and during the cases.

The purpose of this study is to create awareness regarding the profession of judicial advisory and put forward the prospects of this profession in Turkey. The study includes four provinces located in the Eastern Black Sea Region (Trabzon, Rize, Ordu, and Giresun). There are a total of 1,339 lawyers who are registered to the bar associations of the indicated provinces; out of them, 600 lawyers have been communicated, but a questionnaire was conducted on 354 lawyers by employing face-to-face interviews. The data obtained from the questionnaires have been subjected to difference in means (unpaired t-test) and descriptive statistical analyses by using the statistical packet software of SPSS 10.0.

In the consequence of the conducted analyses, it has been determined that the lawyers thought that the members of the profession of accounting working as experts were inadequate. In the event of establishing judicial advisory institution besides the institution of expertise, it is believed that a more beneficial system would be created. It is seen that this thought has not changed among the lawyers in terms of different characteristics except level of education. Additionally, it has been determined that the level of awareness of the lawyers regarding the profession of judicial advisory was insufficient.

The debate over ‘judicial activism’ has flourished in recent decades, but the term was in fact coined 70 years ago, by the historian Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. The legal academy has bemoaned the term as perpetually ill-defined, but can this be attributed to its equivocal beginnings on the pages of Fortune magazine? This chapter investigates the circumstances in which the term was produced and the early meanings given to it in scholarly work. It is argued that there was very little effort on the part of legal academics and political scientists to gather a consensus as to definition, or otherwise to treat the terminology with caution, before the term was wrested from the university cloisters and captured by the popular media in the mid-1960s.

One of the most dramatic controversies over judicial independence in the United States occurred at the state level, in antebellum Kentucky, when two entirely different state high courts remained in operation, each claiming to be the only legitimate tribunal. This chapter describes Kentucky's two-court crisis, but focuses primarily on the constitutional convention of 1849, which followed it. Through the lens of modern scholarship about judicial independence, the lessons that antebellum Kentuckians drew from their own history seem quite counterintuitive. They did not view their project of judicial design as a matter of balancing judicial independence with accountability, a task that many modern scholars of American politics have posited as the central problem of judicial design. Instead, Kentucky's constitutional convention sought to structure an institution that would allow the state's courts to respond to popular sentiment without compromising their independence. Thus, these debates suggest frameworks for understanding judicial independence that do not pit independence against judicial accountability or popular politics, but attempt to discern which forms of politics threaten the independence of courts, and which forms may not.

Popular constitutionalists seek to recover the popular sovereignty foundations of American constitutionalism, bringing the people in as active participants in the constitutional enterprise as they create and refashion the Constitution by “majoritarian and populist mechanisms” (Amar, 1995, p. 89). The result is to recover an understanding, in FDR's words, of constitution as a “layman's document, not a lawyer's contract” (Kramer, 2004, p. 207). This understanding has deep roots in American constitutionalism, tracing its lineage back to the founding and, as popular constitutionalists insist, finds powerful expression in the likes of The Federalist and Abraham Lincoln (Ackerman, 1991; Tushnet, 1998). In exercising popular sovereignty, the people founded the Constitution, but they did not simply retreat from the trajectory of constitutional development. Rather, as Bruce Ackerman argues, since the Constitution of 1787 the people have spoken in a manner that has re-founded the Constitution giving us a “multiple origins originalism” (Kersch, 2006a, p. 801; see also Amar, 1998 and 2005). In turning to founding era thought and the notion of constitutional foundations, popular constitutionalists like Ackerman and Amar make common cause with conservatives who turn to original intent, but then they seek to synthesize this understanding with democratic expressions of popular will by emphasizing both formal and informal constitutional change, giving us layered “foundings,” and a more complex version of “living constitutionalism.” Such constitutional change, however, can only legitimately come from an authentic expression of “We the People.”

Under the doctrine of judicial review established by Marbury v. Madison (1803) and the Administrative Procedure Act (APA), courts retain the power and authority to review legislative and executive actions and rule on their constitutionality or legality. Courts may also review actions of judges and lower court decisions. This is an important and necessary action to maintain the checks and balances and separation of powers in the United States (U.S.) political system. It is also critical for providing legal oversight and accountability. This chapter will first look at judicial review historically including relevant statutes and cases, actions by the executive branch, and efforts by Congress.

Additionally, the chapter will examine the relationship between judicial review and public policy. Through laws passed by Congress or regulations enacted by federal agencies, these branches of government draft policies with the expectation the judicial branch will enforce them. The courts, however, are to uphold the Constitution first and foremost, and rule on the constitutionality of the laws and regulations. Judicial opinions can have the effect of creating policy, which is a different purpose than the Founding Fathers intended. After reviewing the court system, the chapter will examine several issue areas where the court has been shaped by and in turn influenced public policy.