Courthouse Iconography and Chayesian Judicial Practice

Judith Resnik and Dennis Curtis emphasize in Representing Justice that the traditional iconography of courthouses is incongruent with the current practices of the institutions that inhabit them. The key elements of traditional iconography - the blindfolded, scale-balancing Justitia and the courtroom configured for the trial-connote adjudication. Yet, the fraction of judicial work that involves deciding cases on the merits or conducting trials has decreased dramatically. Most judicial work today is basically managerial. We could reduce this incongruity, on the one hand, by reviving the practical adjudicatory focus of the past or, on the other, by revising the iconography to take account of the new practices. Resnik and Curtis encourage both efforts, but they have more enthusiasm for the former. I want to suggest some ways in which imagery and design might be revised to express the importance and value of managerial judging. In particular, I suggest the relevance of what many will consider an unlikely source of inspiration for a new judicial iconography - modem manufacturing and factory design. The technological innovations associated with the Toyota Production System have produced an aesthetic that might contribute both functionally and expressively to the democratic accountability that Resnik and Curtis see as threatened by managerial judging

Whose Dispute Is It Anyway? A Philosophical and Democratic Defense of Settlement (In Some Cases)

I have often thought myself ill-suited to my chosen profession. I love to argue, but I am often too quick to say both, yes, I see your point and concede something to the other side, and to say of my own arguments, yes, but, it\u27s not that simple. In short, I have trouble with polarized argument, debate, and the adversarialism that characterizes much of our work. Where others see black and white, I often see not just the grey but the purple and red-in short, the complexity of human issues that appear before the law for resolution. In the last decade or so, a polarized debate about how disputes should be resolved has demonstrated to me once again the difficulties of simplistic and adversarial arguments

The Unintended Consequences of Enhancing Gun Penalties: Shooting Down the Commerce Clause and Arming Federal Prosecutors

The objective of this work is to derive an MIQP solver tailored for MPC. The MIQP solver is built on the branch and bound method, where QP relaxations of the original problem are solved in the nodes of a binary search tree. The difference between the subproblems is often small and therefore it is interesting to be able to use a previous solution as a starting point in a new subproblem. This is referred to as a warm start of the solver. Because of its good warm start properties, a dual active set QP method was chosen. The method is tailored for MPC by solving a part of the KKT system using a Riccati recursion, which makes the computational complexity of the QP iterations grow linearly with the prediction horizon. Simulation results are presented both for the QP solver itself and when it is incorporated as a part of the MIQP solver. In both cases the computational complexity is significantly reduced compared to if a primal active set solver not utilizing structure is used

Authorized Managerialism Under the Federal Rules— and the Extent of Convergence With Civil-Law Judging

This article, part of a symposium marking the fortieth anniversary of the United States District Court for the Central District of California, first surveys the (very considerable) extent to which changes in the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure over the past quarter century have expanded and legitimized the pretrial managerial powers of federal trial-court judges. It then turns to an issue sometimes touched on in prior literature--whether the move toward greater managerialism departs from the adversarial model of the judge as passive referee and makes us more like supposedly inquisitorial civil-law systems. To the extent that civil-law judges generally exercise considerable initiative and control in shaping the course of civil proceedings (which they appear to do in some civil-law systems but less so or very little in others), greater managerialism in America does appear to bring about a significant degree of convergence. And greater promotion of settlement and alternative dispute resolution by American managerial judges also seems to bring us closer to practice in at least some prominent civil-law systems. But a defining feature of systems that truly deserve the label inquisitorial is judicial primacy in fact-gathering, found in some--but again, not all--civil-law systems. On this measure American managerialism largely does not put the judge in that role, so that statements appearing to see our managerialism as converging with inquisitorial systems are correct only to the extent that our practices may be becoming somewhat more like the non-inquisitorial aspects of civil-law judging. Nor should the label inquisitorial obscure the very considerable extent of party control that exists in civil-law as well as adversarial common-law systems. And, of course, much American pretrial managerialism is about discovery, of which civil-law systems (and other common-law ones as well) have considerably less than we do. The convergence effected by greater American pretrial managerialism thus is significant, but in limited respects, and needs to be addressed with precision. In particular, comparisons should avoid implying that we are yet in any major way moving toward the model of judge as truly inquisitorial investigator with lead responsibility for ferreting out the facts relevant to the parties\u27 dispute

ADR and the Courts: An Update

For well over a decade now, Alternative Dispute Resolution (ADR) and all its variations have been hailed in rhetoric and anecdote as the Prince Charming to a court system in distress. The author briefly examines three kinds of ADR programs: those that take place inside the court (which are sometimes called court-annexed programs ), those that occur inside the administrative agency (or agency-annexed programs, only a small portion of whose product may come before the courts), and negotiated regulations, some of which (despite all good efforts) continue to be challenged on review

Litigation and Settlement under Judicial Agency

We model the settlement of a legal dispute where the trial outcome depends on the behavior of a strategically motivated judge. We consider a standard asymmetric information model where the uninformed defendant makes a take it or leave it offer. If the case goes to trial, the judge decides how much effort to exert to learn about the actual damages inflicted on the plaintiff. We show that under very general assumptions the model exhibits multiple equilibria. In equilibria in which the judge exerts less effort more cases settle out of court, and vice versa. The judge is better off in low effort equilibria, with a higher settlement rate. However, the terms of the settlement heavily favor the informed plaintiff, and consequently induce over-investment in ex ante preventive care by the defendant.Litigation, settlement, trial, judges