Framing the Court. Political Reactions to the Ruling on the Declaration of Sovereignty of the Catalan Parliament

This article analyses the reactions by political actors to the ruling of the Spanish Constitutional Court on the Declaration of Sovereignty of the Catalan parliament. It is suggested that political framings of the ruling can be classified into the legalist, attitudinal and institutional academic models of judicial behaviour. As will be shown, these models have a normative dimension, with implications for the ideal of the rule of law. These implications are skilfully captured and exploited by political actors as part of a wider battle for the framing of the ruling. The rule of law thus becomes politicised as a result of the tension around the judicialisation of the so-called Catalan ‘sovereignist process’

Councils of the Judiciary and Judges’ Perceptions of Respect to Their Independence in Europe

Councils of the Judiciary have spread in Europe under the assumption that they contribute to a central aspect of the Rule of Law: the independence of courts and judges under their authority. However, a recent survey of the European Network of Councils of the Judiciary showed that, in some countries, there are significant groups of judges that perceive their Judicial Council as disrespectful of their autonomy. While in countries such as Denmark or Belgium judicial distrust of the Council seems to be anecdotal, in other countries such as Spain a striking 36 per cent of respondent judges had such negative views of the institution. With the aid of mvQCA, this paper explains the causes of this paradoxical phenomenon. It is argued that judges hold such negative opinions of Councils of the Judiciary as the result of the interaction between institutional, political and socio-legal conditions: the range of powers of the Councils, their control by political elites and interest groups, and the degree of judicial corruption

Constitutional courts and citizens' perceptions of judicial systems in Europe

In recent decades, constitutional courts have become essential institutions in the political systems of many European countries. At the legal level, constitutional courts are designed as organs intended to protect and enforce the normative constitution. At the political level, they are also expected to play a role in the protection of democratic systems of government and human rights. However, the stability of a democracy does not only depend on efficient institutional designs, but also on acceptable levels of public support for democratic institutions. Using data from the European Social Survey, this article shows that constitutional courts have negative effects on public views of the court system in at least two dimensions: perceptions of judicial independence and perceptions of judicial fairness. These effects, however, decrease with the age of the democratic system. Given the core role that diffuse support for the judiciary plays in the stability of the rule of law in a country, our findings suggest that, paradoxically, constitutional courts might have detrimental effects to the very goal that justifies their existence: the protection of democratic systems of government

“¿Importa el derecho?”. Política judicial, realismo jurídico y el problema de la indeterminación del derecho en tanto que problema metodológico

Las últimas décadas han supuesto la irrupción de la nueva disciplina de la “política judicial”, heredera del realismo jurídico y empeñada en estudiar el comportamiento judicial con herramientas científico-sociales y desde variables explicativas sociopolíticas. Al hacerlo, sin embargo, dichos estudios han preterido el papel del derecho en la explicación del comportamiento de los magistrados, para lo cual se han esgrimido razones teóricas acerca de la indeterminación de la norma jurídica. En este artículo, defiendo que dicha preterición constituye una importante limitación para la construcción de modelos empíricos de comportamiento judicial

Issues and Observations on Applications of the Constrained-Path Monte Carlo Method to Many-Fermion Systems

We report several important observations that underscore the distinctions between the constrained-path Monte Carlo method and the continuum and lattice versions of the fixed-node method. The main distinctions stem from the differences in the state space in which the random walk occurs and in the manner in which the random walkers are constrained. One consequence is that in the constrained-path method the so-called mixed estimator for the energy is not an upper bound to the exact energy, as previously claimed. Several ways of producing an energy upper bound are given, and relevant methodological aspects are illustrated with simple examples.Comment: 28 pages, REVTEX, 5 ps figure

Proof for an upper bound in fixed-node Monte Carlo for lattice fermions

We justify a recently proposed prescription for performing Green Function Monte Carlo calculations on systems of lattice fermions, by which one is able to avoid the sign problem. We generalize the prescription such that it can also be used for problems with hopping terms of different signs. We prove that the effective Hamiltonian, used in this method, leads to an upper bound for the ground-state energy of the real Hamiltonian, and we illustrate the effectiveness of the method on small systems.Comment: 14 pages in revtex v3.0, no figure

An alternative index of abundance for Atlantic skipjack (Katsuwonus pelamis) based on catch ratio and abundance of a reference species.

Indices of abundance, frequently based on catch rates per unit effort (CPUE), are one of the main inputs to tropical tuna stock assessments. While standardized longline CPUE series are routinely obtained and used in the stock assessments of yellowfin and bigeye tunas, the standardization of the effort in fisheries targeting skipjack tuna is more problematic, due to several factors that are known to affect the efficiency of the fleets but are difficult to quantify. In this scenario, alternative approaches need to be tested. In this document, we propose an alternative approach based on the ratio in the catch of skipjack vs yellowfin tuna, using the abundance of the reference species as an offset in the standardization.En prens