Courts Beyond Dispositions: Measuring judicial performance, trust in courts, economic returns, and legal rules

Abstract

Traditional strands of judicial politics focus on the effects of political actors on case dispositions. However, newly available datasets, advances in computational methods, and growing acknowledgment of the gender dimension of judging have prompted a wellspring of new theory-driven questions. This panel brings together four papers that engage with these emerging questions in comparative perspective. Within the context of the EU legal system, one paper examines the politics of judicial personnel by investigating whether more gender-diverse panels improve efficiency at the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU). Another paper contributes by measuring the legal rules produced by the CJEU to assess whether the Court is more responsive to legal arguments from EU institutions or from Member States. Looking more broadly at Europe and beyond, one paper explores how and to what extent expert commentary on salient case decisions may buffer partisan polarization, while another disentangles the economic benefits of serving on the Ecuadorian Constitutional Court, demonstrating how such appointments increase post-tenure income. Together, these papers draw on newly collected data sources and translate them into robust research designs, showing how courts matter beyond the immediate case dispositions at hand

Title	Details
Comparative Public Trust in Courts	View Paper Details
Measuring Legal Rules in the European Union	View Paper Details
Which Elites Move Trust in Courts? Impact of Expert vs. Partisan Cues on Judicial Legitimacy	View Paper Details
Panel effects beyond outcomes: Gender and judicial efficiency	View Paper Details
Disentangling the value of the judicial office: Evidence from Ecuador	View Paper Details