Law, Courts and Judicial Politics

Courts and legal arguments play an increasingly important role in contemporary politics, but also in the concepts of comparative politics. In spite of this fact, comparative research about courts is under-developed outside the United States. Scholars have mainly focused on the Judicialisation hypothesis, with its narrow argument that the introduction of a constitutional court and its subsequent activity leads to a Judicialisation of political decisions. Only a few articles questioned this position and claimed that Judicialisation may at least be regulated by some variables, such as judicial preferences, judicial dogmas, public opinion and electoral competition. We also rarely find substantial comparative analyses of courts and their internal institutional settings as well as their relations to other actors and institutions. The research gaps are especially problematic since courts play an important role in most concepts of comparative politics. Therefore, the field of law, courts and judicial politics needs to move ahead, especially in the European context where there are only a few publications about comparative judicial politics being published in peer-reviewed journals. In order to set a firm base for comparative research we have to fulfil a series of tasks. We need to enlarge our focus of research in regard of approaches, issues, methodology and data in a comparative manner. We therefore suggest seven aspects to be discussed in this section. Six of them deal with issues and approaches in specific areas: (1) international courts, (2) courts in democratic systems, (3) courts in non-democratic systems as well as in the processes of democratisation or democratic breakdown, (4) the institutional design and change of legal institutions, (5) legal mobilisation and (6) courts and public policies. The (7) is explicitly dedicated to methods and data of law and courts research. The section is supported by the Standing Group on Law and Courts.