Judicial Reputation: A Comparative Theory - Softcover

Garoupa, Nuno; Ginsburg, Tom

Softcover

ISBN 10: 022647870X ISBN 13: 9780226478708

Publisher: University of Chicago Press, 2017

Synopsis

Judges are society’s elders and experts, our masters and mediators. We depend on them to dispense justice with integrity, deliberation, and efficiency. Yet judges, as Alexander Hamilton famously noted, lack the power of the purse or the sword. They must rely almost entirely on their reputations to secure compliance with their decisions, obtain resources, and maintain their political influence.

In Judicial Reputation, Nuno Garoupa and Tom Ginsburg explain how reputation is not only an essential quality of the judiciary as a whole, but also of individual judges. Perceptions of judicial systems around the world range from widespread admiration to utter contempt, and as judges participate within these institutions some earn respect, while others are scorned. Judicial Reputation explores how judges respond to the reputational incentives provided by the different audiences they interact with—lawyers, politicians, the media, and the public itself—and how institutional structures mediate these interactions. The judicial structure is best understood not through the lens of legal culture or tradition, but through the economics of information and reputation. Transcending those conventional lenses, Garoupa and Ginsburg employ their long-standing research on the latter to examine the fascinating effects that governmental interactions, multicourt systems, extrajudicial work, and the international rule-of-law movement have had on the reputations of judges in this era.

About this title

About the Authors

Nuno Garoupa is professor of law at Texas A&M University and holds the chair in research innovation at the Católica Global School of Law, Universidade Católica Portuguesa in Lisbon, Portugal.

Tom Ginsburg is the Leo Spitz Distinguished Service Professor of International Law at the University of Chicago, where he serves as Faculty Director for the Forum on Free Inquiry and Expression, as well as the Malyi Center for the Study of Institutional and Legal Integrity. He is also a research professor at the American Bar Foundation. He holds BA, JD, and PhD degrees from the University of California at Berkeley, and currently co-directs the Comparative Constitutions Project. He is the author or editor of thirty books, including How to Save a Constitutional Democracy with Aziz Z. Huq, also published by the University of Chicago Press.

Edition details

• Publisher: University of Chicago Press
• Publication date: 2017
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 022647870X
• ISBN 13: 9780226478708
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 285