Introduction to Public Trust and Confidence in the Courts

This special issue is fortunate in its timing. The topic of public perceptions of the courts is having a rare moment in the limelight thanks to the drama of Florida’s ballots and what can count as a vote (or what opportunities there are for recounting ballots) in the U.S. Presidential election. The outcome of the political election seemed to rest on successive decisions by the judicial system: in particular, Florida’s trial and appellate courts, the federal court of appeals, and ultimately the U.S. Supreme Court. Each of these courts addressed the propriety of electoral ballot counts for Presidential candidates in various Florida counties. The apparent political nature of the legal decisions in virtually each case fueled concern about the solidity of public support for the judiciary. In particular, claims were made that the results were partisan and would cause an abrupt decline in public support for the courts and in the value given to the judiciary’s independence of other branches of government. Our initial call for papers for this special issue preceded the Florida events by more than a year. Nonetheless, the resulting issue is very relevant to the questions raised in news reports and debated in list-serves of social scientists and legal professionals interested in the law and legal institutions. What do the articles have in common? All seven articles are empirical. Six of the seven rely on data from surveys conducted in the United States and analyze opinion on “state and local courts” or “courts in your community” or “the courts of State X”. The U.S. Supreme Court, the staple of political science and sociological examination of American courts, is rarely mentioned. This may, in part, reflect, the availability of new data. Fifteen states have commissioned opinion surveys since 1995. In addition, in recent years three national surveys focused on state, but not federal, courts. There are other similarities among the articles. All seven studies refer to racial and ethnic diff erences in opinions about the courts and legal institutions, and four of the seven explicitly seek to explain those diff erences, including the sole non-U.S. study, a consideration of ethnic differences in Israel

CRIME IN THE REPUBLIC OF IRELAND: STATISTICAL TRENDS AND THEIR INTERPRETATION. ESRI General Research Series Paper No. 102, November 1980

There is widespread agreement that crime in Ireland has become both more frequent and more costly in the past two decades. Crime is today a recognised social problem, its magnitude a subject of public concern and the possibilities for its amelioration a matter of public debate. The statistics which the Garda Siochana compile and publish are the only available evidence on which such discussion can be based, lifting the annual Report on Crime from relative obscurity to a prominence it is not really designed to hold. In newspaper coverage and in the D~iil, the annual increases, or, more rarely, decreases in the number of indictable offences are taken as a score card of garda failure and success, of disorder and public order. However, despite the interest in the problem of crime and in the crime statistics, there have been few research studies of the issues involved

Antecedents and consequences of inmate population characteristics in Illinois county jails / CAC No. 184

Bibliography; p. 101-103

Interface Hamiltonians and bulk critical behavior

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Court Review: Volume 44, Issue 1/2 – Procedural Fairness as a Court Reform Agenda

This essay reflects on the ways in which procedural fairness can provide the direction for a revived court reform agenda. All previous eras of court reform were guided by a theory drawn either from academia or the field of management. Procedural fairness, in my view, is the organizing theory for which 21st-century court reform has been waiting. Past eras of court reform accomplished a great deal. In 1950, there were 826 trial courts in California. Today, 58 trial courts—one per county—hear all manners of cases. Management theories drawn from the business field provided the blueprint for court reform by (a) simplifying trial court structure though consolidation, (b) centralizing management, (c) replacing local court funding with state funding under a centralized budget, and (d) centralizing rule making

Court Review: Volume 39, Issue 1 - The White Decision in the Court of Opinion: Views of Judges and the General Public

The U.S. Supreme Court’s first decision on judicial elections— Republican Party of Minnesota v. White—came on the heels of the first national opinion survey devoted entirely to judicial selection issues. In late 2001, 1,000 randomly selected members of the public and 2,500 state appellate and trial judges answered questions about their participation in judicial elections, opinions about current practices, and support for various reform proposals. Some questions were asked of judges and public alike, while other questions concentrated on their respective roles in the election process. The surveys were conducted on behalf of the Justice at Stake Campaign, a nationwide coalition of legal and citizen organizations concerned with preserving judicial independence. These surveys present a unique opportunity to evaluate empirically some of the explicit and implicit assertions made by respondents, lower courts, amici curiae, and the Supreme Court justices concerning what the public thinks and wants, and how judges experience campaigning and the canons. Indeed, the survey’s findings are a part of the record in the White decision. One amicus brief (filed by the Brennan Center) and Justice O’Connor’s concurring opinion cited the survey. All references are to survey questions about the influence of judicial campaign fundraising. Justice O’Connor noted that: Even if judges were able to refrain from favoring donors, the mere possibility that judges’ decisions may be motivated by the desire to repay campaign contributors is likely to undermine the public’s confidence in the judiciary. See Greenberg Quinlan Rosner Research, Inc., and American Viewpoint, National Public Opinion Survey Frequency Questionnaire (2001), available at http://www.justiceatstake.org/ files/JASNationalSurveyResuls.pdf) (describing survey results indicating that 76 percent of registered voters believe that campaign contributions influence judicial decisions); id., at 7 (describing survey results indicating that two-thirds of registered voters believe individuals and groups who give money to judicial candidates often receive favorable treatment). The surveys have more to say on the topic of campaign fundraising by judges, and include questions that describe judicial and voter behavior at election time. Survey participants were also asked to indicate their support for various proposals for improving judicial elections. Other questions sought more abstract impressions of what it means to be a judge. The status of the judge as a politician was a particular theme. Questions ask how judges should campaign and how judges compare to other public officials who run for office. The survey thus allows some exploration of fundamental concerns about judicial independence and accountability. The result is a complex image of judges. Both judges and the public hold equivocal views of where the judge as decision-maker intersects with the judge as fundraiser and campaigner

Public Trust and Confidence in the Courts: What Public Opinion Surveys Mean to Judges

In August 1998 a comprehensive national survey added to the growing mass of information on how the public perceives the state courts. The “Perceptions of the U.S. Justice System,” commissioned by the American Bar Association, relied on telephone interviews of 1,000 American adults selected at random. The respondents were asked for their opinions about “the justice system,” lawyers, judges, law enforcement and the courts. The findings from the ABA survey were optimistic relative to most of the previous surveys. Public confidence in the courts relative to other major institutions seemed higher, and experience with courts appeared to promote higher rather than lower levels of confidence. For the most part, however, there was more continuity than change in the 1998 survey. The public retained rather stereotypical views of how courts and judges work. Over twenty years of surveys, the same negative and positive images of the judiciary recurred with varying degrees of forcefulness across all of the national and state surveys. The negative images centered on perceived inaccessibility, unfairness in the treatment of racial and ethnic minorities, leniency toward criminals, and a lack of concern about the problems of ordinary people. There was concern that the courts are biased in favor of the wealthy and corporations. Indeed, the perception of economic- based unfairness in civil cases seemed to rival the perception of judicial leniency in criminal cases as a source of public dissatisfaction. There also was strong evidence of public concern that political considerations, and especially campaign fundraising, exerted an undue influence on the judiciary. The surveys also uncovered positive images of the courts. There were perceptions that judges are honest and fair in case decisions and well-trained, that the jury system works, and that judges and court personnel treat members of the public with courtesy and respect. While the surveys between 1977 and 1998 reveal the contours of a relatively consistent public image of courts, it remained a broad-brush portrait. In particular, we lack a body of data that can measure the extent to which the image of the courts is the same when viewed from the perspective of different social groups. In this article, we use findings from a new survey to explore differences in perceptions of the courts among racial and ethnic groups and other issues that, in our view, deserve urgent attention by the judiciary in a period of reexamination of what the courts are doing and need to do better to secure the public’s trust and confidence