Hostname: page-component-586b7cd67f-dlnhk Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-29T00:31:41.543Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

On Constructing a Science of Comparative Judicial Politics: Tate & Haynie's “Authoritarianism and the Functions of Courts”

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 April 2024

Howard Gillman
Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Extract

Core share and HTML view are not available for this content. However, as you have access to this content, a full PDF is available via the ‘Save PDF’ action button.

Tate and Haynie's (1993) recent essay in these pages on the functions of courts in authoritarian regimes is evidence of an increasing interest among American political scientists in the comparative study of judicial politics. There have always been a few among us who have argued for the benefits of broadening our perspectives beyond the American judiciary. As the story goes, the effort began 30 years ago with just a handful of pioneers meeting in a Dallas hotel room to discuss ways to make comparative judicial studies a more conspicuous feature of public law scholarship among political scientists (see Abraham 1987). Over the years a fairly diverse and distinguished group of social scientists have contributed to this effort (see Tate 1987). By 1981 there was sufficient interest among scholars affiliated with the International Political Science Association to convene the Mansfield College Conference on Comparative Judicial Studies. That same year Martin Shapiro gave a boost to these effort with the publication of his influential and widely read Courts: A Comparative and Political Analysis. Still, it was not until 1987 that the first collection of essays was published on “comparative judicial systems,” and even then the papers in that volume were characterized in the subtitle as representing “challenging frontiers in conceptual and empirical analysis” (Schmidhauser 1987). Over the course of 30 years a few more pioneers were recruited, but apparently the terrain was still a frontier.

Type
Of Dragons, Flowers, and Constructing a Science: An Exchange
Information
Law & Society Review , Volume 28 , Issue 2 , 1994 , pp. 355 - 376
Copyright
Copyright © 1997 by The Law and Society Association.

References

Abraham, Henry J. (1987) “Foreword,” in Schmidhauser, J. R., ed., Comparative Judicial Systems: Challenging Frontiers in Conceptual and Empirical Analysis. London: Butterworths.Google Scholar
Almond, Gabriel A., & Greco, Stephen (1990) “Clouds, Clocks, and the Study of Politics,” in G. A. Almond, A Discipline Divided: Schools and Sects in Political Science. Newbury Park, CA: Sage Publications.Google Scholar
Bohman, James (1991) New Philosophy of Social Science: Problems of Indeterminacy. Cambridge: MIT Press.Google Scholar
Cook, Beverly Blair (1989) “Sentencing Behavior of Federal Judges: Draft Cases—1972,” in Goldman, S. & Sarat, A., eds., American Court Systems: Readings in Judicial Process and Behavior. 2d ed. New York: Longman.Google Scholar
Fish, Stanley (1989) Doing What Comes Naturally. Durham, NC: Duke Univ. Press.Google Scholar
Gates, John B. (1991) “Theory, Methods, and the New Instituationalism in Judicial Research,” in Gates, J. B. & Johnson, C. A., eds., The American Courts: A Critical Assessment. Washington, DC: CQ Press.Google Scholar
Geertz, Clifford (1983) Local Knowledge. New York: Basic Books.Google Scholar
Gibson, James L. (1986) “The Social Science of Judicial Politics,” in Weisberg, H. F., ed., Political Science: The Science of Politics. New York: Agathon Press.Google Scholar
Hempel, Carl G. (1965) Aspects of Scientific Explanation. New York: Free Press.Google Scholar
Hiley, David R., Bohman, James F., & Shusterman, Richard, eds. (1991) The Interpretive Turn: Philosophy, Science, Culture. Ithaca, NY: Cornell Univ. Press.Google Scholar
MacIntyre, Alasdair (1978). “Is a Science of Comparative Politics Possible?” in A. MacIntyre, Against the Self-Images of the Age. Notre Dame, IN: Univ. of Notre Dame Press.Google Scholar
Przeworski, Adam, & Teune, Henry (1970) The Logic of Comparative Social Inquiry. New York: Wiley-Interscience.Google Scholar
Robertson, David Brian (1993) “The Return to History and the New Instinationalism in American Political Science,” 17 Social Science History 1.Google Scholar
Rorty, Richard (1980) “A Reply to Dreyfus and Taylor,” 34 Rev. of Metaphysics 39.Google Scholar
Rorty, Richard (1982) “Method, Social Science, and Social Hope,” in Consequences of Pragmatism. Minneapolis: Univ. of Minnesota Press.Google Scholar
Sarat, Austin (1990) “Off to Meet the Wizard: Beyond Validity and Reliability in the Search for Post-empiricist Sociology of Law,” 15 Law & Social Inquiry 155.Google Scholar
Schmidhauser, John R. (1987) “Conclusion,” in Schmidhauser, J. R., ed., Comparative Judicial Systems: Challenging Frontiers in Conceptual and Empirical Analysis. London: Butterworths.Google Scholar
Shapiro, Martin (1980) “Appeal,” 14 Law and Society Review 629.Google Scholar
Shapiro, Martin (1981) Courts: A Comparative and Political Analysis. Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Smith, Rogers M. (1988) “Political Jurisprudence, the ‘New Institutionalism,‘ and the Future of Public Law,” 82 American Political Science Rev. 89.Google Scholar
Smith, Rogers M. (1992) “If Politics Matters: Implications for a ‘New Institutionalism,‘” 6 Studies in American Political Development 1.Google Scholar
Tate, C. Neal (1974) “The Philippine Supreme Court and Martial Law: Constitutional and Institutional Performance.” Presented at Western Conference of the Association for Asian Studies annual meeting, Tempe, AZ.Google Scholar
Tate, C. Neal (1987) “Judicial Institutions in Cross-National Perspective: Toward Integrating Courts into the Comparative Study of Politics,” in Schmidhauser, J. R., ed., Comparative Judicial Systems: Challenging Frontiers in Conceptual and Empirical Analysis. London: Butterworths.Google Scholar
Schmidhauser, J. R. (1993) “Courts and Crisis Regimes: A Theory Sketch with Asian Case Studies,” 46 Political Research Q. 311.Google Scholar
Tate, C. Neal, & Handberg, Roger (1991) “Time Binding and Theory Building in Personal Attribute Models of Supreme Court Voting Behavior, 1916–1988,” 35 American J. of Political Science 460.Google Scholar
Tate, C. Neal, & Haynie, Stacia (1993) “Authoritarianism and the Functions of Courts: A Time Series Analysis of the Phillipine Supreme Court, 1961–1987,” 27 Law & Society Rev. 707.Google Scholar
Taylor, Charles (1985) “Interpretation and the Sciences of Man,” in C. Taylor, Philosophy and the Human Sciences. Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Trubek, David M., & Esser, John (1989) “‘Critical Empiricism’ in American Legal Studies: Paradox, Program, or Pandora's Box?” 14 Law & Social Inquiry 3.Google Scholar