Consequential Courts: Judicial Roles in Global Perspective

In the early twenty-first century, courts have become versatile actors in the governance of many constitutional democracies, and judges play a variety of roles in politics and policy making. Assembling papers penned by an array of academic specialists on high courts around the world, and presented during a year-long Andrew W. Mellon Foundation John E. Sawyer Seminar at the University of California, Berkeley, this volume maps the roles in governance that courts are undertaking and the ways in which they have come to matter in the political life of their nations. It offers empirically rich accounts of dramatic judicial actions in the Americas, Europe, the Middle East, and Asia, exploring the political conditions and judicial strategies that have fostered those assertions of power, and evaluating when and how courts' performance of new roles has been politically consequential. By focusing on the content and consequences of judicial power, the book advances a new agenda for the comparative study of courts.

Diana Kapiszewski is Assistant Professor of Political Science at the University of California, Irvine. She is the author of High Courts and Economic Governance in Argentina and Brazil, which draws on her PhD dissertation, which was winner of the American Political Science Association's Edward S. Corwin Award for Best Dissertation in Public Law, and is also co-authoring Field Research in Political Science, the discipline's first book-length treatment of fieldwork.