The past decade has brought an unprecedented boom in the study of courts as political
actors in Latin America. We examine the extraordinary diversity of academic research on …

This groundbreaking work examines Latin America's prison crisis and the failure of mass
incarceration policies. As crime rates rose over the past few decades, policy makers adopted …

In the wake of Donald Trump's presidency, a fierce discussion over expanding the US
Supreme Court erupted. However, the expansion of a court's membership is just one of …

In many Latin American countries the executive branch manipulates the composition of the
Supreme Court, and judicial independence has remained elusive. Because high courts can …

Economic analysis of substantive legal rules generally suppresses the adjudication of
factual and legal disputes that a legal rule might engender. The nature of adjudication …

The general objective of this dissertation can be stated in four steps:(1) To provide a precise
definition of judicial independence;(2) to create a measure of judicial independence de jure …

Political competition should protect judicial autonomy. A host of studies produce evidence
that is consistent with this expectation. The influence of political competition operates …

This dissertation seeks to explain the behavior of one of the most activist high courts in the
world, the Colombian Constitutional Court, since its creation in 1991. The standard …

In 2011, Bolivia became the first modern country to directly elect national judges. Reformers
heralded the adoption of judicial elections as a “democratization of justice,” by which …

Judges' legal culture is a factor that has been regarded as an important explanation of
judicial behavior. As a concept, however, it has been difficult to operationalize and measure …