Courts and Their Allies

Abstract

Allies such as opposition parties, civil society actors, the media, foreign governments, and international courts play a central role in strengthening judicial independence, the visibility of courts, and their institutional legitimacy. Rather than treating courts as isolated actors, the panel approaches them as embedded in broader political and societal networks. It includes papers that systematically explore the multifaceted relationships between courts and their allies, focusing on how different forms of support by these allies help judicial institutions to withstand political attacks or to increase compliance with their decisions, how interactions with different allies shape judicial behavior or how allies adapt to changes in court behavior. By analyzing diverse forms of collaboration, the panel shows how such alliances contribute to courts’ democratic resilience and broader institutional goals, as well as to which degree courts pay attention to existing and potential allies. The panel features theoretical, empirical, and methodologically diverse research that analyzes when and how alliances are effective and how they reshape the role of courts across political systems with varying levels of democracy. Specifically, the contributions assess the conditions under which social mobilization emerges in response to court-curbing attacks and examine how judges act strategically to promote compliance when facing societal pressure. Further, they analyze how judges strategically leak draft decisions, either in coordination with allies or in anticipation of their support, and study how actors engaged in legal mobilization respond to restrictive turns in jurisprudence.

Title	Details
Civil Society and Court-Curbing: Explaining the Dynamics of Mobilization	View Paper Details
Monitoring High Court Rulings in New Democracies	View Paper Details
Leaking Judicial Drafts: Comparative Judicial Politics Behind Opinion Leaking	View Paper Details
To Have a Friend, You Need to Be One: Mobilizing Strategies of Third-Party Interveners Before the European Court of Human Rights in an Age of Backlash	View Paper Details
Exploring the Role of Judicial Support Networks in Judicial Resilience	View Paper Details