The Impact of Female Leadership in Collegial Courts on Time to Render Merits Decisions: Evidence from the Norwegian Supreme Court

What is the effect of gender on the deliberative process of judging? Drawing on previous research on female leaders’ inclination to foster a more inclusive and collaborative decision-making process, we argue that decision making takes more time in a collegial court when female justices preside over decisional panels. Analyzing an original data set on cases decided by the Norwegian Supreme Court between 2008 and 2019, we find that when a woman is the presiding justice, the duration of case disposition time increases. This effect, however, persists for only eight days. Our finding suggests that institutional practices take effect over gendered effects.publishedVersio

Supreme Court Justices’ Economic Behaviour: A Multilevel Model Analysis

Supreme Court justices are overlooked, but important, national policy-making players who render final and consequential decisions in cases on economic conflicts. The research question asks what forces explain the decisional behaviour of Supreme Court justices in economic rights cases between a private and a public party. Theoretically, the decisional behaviour of an individual justice is a function of his or her notion as to what makes ‘good’ law, pursued in a cultural-collegial setting that is oriented by majoritarian requirements, while constrained by the legal nature of the case being considered. Empirically, all economic decisions made by Norwegian Supreme Court justices in five-justice panels from 1963 to 2012 are analyzed. Our multilevel model demonstrates that individual, collegial and case-level forces all contribute to explain the justices’ votes. These results suggest that case-related dynamics, such as who the plaintiff is or the amount of disagreement between justices, matter, but also that ideology – via appointment mechanisms – matters when a nation's high court justices decide economic cases. Understanding the foundational assumptions and the institutional procedures is vital when transporting judicial behaviour models across polities

Why Do Interest Groups Engage the Judiciary? Policy Wishes and Structural Needs

We test two competing explanations in order to answer the question: Why do organized interests choose to engage in advocacy behavior? The first turns on the notion that concerns with policy success are the principal forces affecting a group's choice. To a lesser degree, issues of group maintenance have also been identified as entering into organized interests' decisional calculus. Copyright (c) 2006 Southwestern Social Science Association.

Reassessing the Voting Behavior of Minority and Female Judges on the Federal Bench

Presented at the Annual Meeting of the Midwest Political Science Association Utilizing exclusive data on race and gender discrimination, abortion, search and seizure and states’ rights cases, this paper is a comprehensive empirical study of voting behavior of black, Hispanic and female judges on the U.S. Courts of Appeals

The Impact of Female Leadership in Collegial Courts on Time to Render Merits Decisions: Evidence from the Norwegian Supreme Court

What is the effect of gender on the deliberative process of judging? Drawing on previous research on female leaders’ inclination to foster a more inclusive and collaborative decision-making process, we argue that decision making takes more time in a collegial court when female justices preside over decisional panels. Analyzing an original data set on cases decided by the Norwegian Supreme Court between 2008 and 2019, we find that when a woman is the presiding justice, the duration of case disposition time increases. This effect, however, persists for only eight days. Our finding suggests that institutional practices take effect over gendered effects

From Backlogs to Quality Assurance. The Development of Law Clerk Units at Norwegian Courts

The Consultative Council of European Judges (CCJE) approves the role of law clerks assisting judges in their decision making but cautions against clerks replacing judges. In this article we put CCJE’s caution to a test and study law clerks at the Norwegian Supreme Court and the Borgarting and the Gulating courts of appeal, the country’s two largest courts of appeal. The general pattern for all three courts is that the pretext for hiring clerks changes from backlog problems to quality assurance, that clerks become organized in separate units, that the number of tasks performed by clerks increases, and that women constitute an outsized presence in the clerk units. The growth in clerks contribute to institutionalizing courts. We conclude that clerks perform tasks of the judges, that they replace judges, that clerks unfluence decision making, but that clerks have not become judges or make final decisions

From Backlogs to Quality Assurance. The Development of Law Clerk Units at Norwegian Courts

The Consultative Council of European Judges (CCJE) approves the role of law clerks assisting judges in their decision making but cautions against clerks replacing judges. In this article we put CCJE’s caution to a test and study law clerks at the Norwegian Supreme Court and the Borgarting and the Gulating courts of appeal, the country’s two largest courts of appeal. The general pattern for all three courts is that the pretext for hiring clerks changes from backlog problems to quality assurance, that clerks become organized in separate units, that the number of tasks performed by clerks increases, and that women constitute an outsized presence in the clerk units. The growth in clerks contribute to institutionalizing courts. We conclude that clerks perform tasks of the judges, that they replace judges, that clerks unfluence decision making, but that clerks have not become judges or make final decisions

A High Court Plays the Accordion: Validating Ex Ante Case Complexity on Oral Arguments

While high courts with fixed time for oral arguments deprive researchers of the opportunity to extract temporal variance, courts that apply the “accordion model” institutional design and adjust the time for oral arguments according to the perceived complexity of a case are a boon for research that seeks to validate case complexity well ahead of the courts’ opinion writing. We analyze an original data set of all 1,402 merits decisions of the Norwegian Supreme Court from 2008 to 2018 where the justices set time for oral arguments to accommodate the anticipated difficulty of the case. Our validation model empirically tests whether and how attributes of a case associated with ex ante complexity are linked with time allocated for oral arguments. Cases that deal with international law and civil law, have several legal players, are cross-appeals from lower courts are indicative of greater case complexity. We argue that these results speak powerfully to the use of case attributes and/or the time reserved for oral arguments as ex ante measures of case complexity. To enhance the external validity of our findings, future studies should examine whether these results are confirmed in high courts with similar institutional design for oral arguments. Subsequent analyses should also test the degree to which complex cases and/or time for oral arguments have predictive validity on more divergent opinions among the justices and on the time courts and justices need to render a final opinion