Popular insurance models of judicial independence contend that electoral competition induces executives to establish or maintain independence as insurance against the risks associated with losing office. Existing accounts, however, focus only on variation in the likelihood of losing office, treating risks associated with losing as constant. This inattention to the model’s causal logic limits theoretical development and empirical conclusions. We model the demand for insurance rather than simply the likelihood of losing office, with empirical implications tested via instrumental variables. This paper offers a major development of the insurance account, with important implications for the study of judicial independence.

The Fourth Republic is Nigeria's longest experience in democratic practice. It is a democracy founded upon the ideal of separation of powers; each branch checks the other two within defined boundaries. To act as an effective check on the political branches of government, the judiciary, especially the Supreme Court, is built around structures that guarantee its independence. This article assesses the Supreme Court of Nigeria's use of discretion within this web and argues that the court now inevitably allows powerful actors to bank on its legitimacy and induce it to overstretch its competence to satisfy their individual policy and political preferences. This trend, the article finds, is antithetical to the concept of judicial independence. A court's independence is not only apparent when it is able to do what it is meant to do but also when it is able to refrain from what it is not meant to do.

Democratic backsliding is becoming increasingly widespread, filtering into not just constitutional law but other areas of substantive Union law. This article explores this phenomenon by focusing on how domestic judicial reforms spread to the day-to-day operation of EU competition law. It references two fundamental principles of Union law – mutual trust and effective judicial protection – before focusing on the European Competition Network, which requires national competition authorities to cooperate when discharging their duties under Union law. Lastly, it discusses the systemic consequences this can have for the operation of EU competition law, the internal market, and EU law more broadly.

Awareness of courts has long been theorized to engender enhanced support for judicial independence, but this is a logic that works only under the best of circumstances. We argue that interbranch politics influences what aware citizens know and learn about their court, and we theorize how awareness interacts with individual-level and context-dependent factors to bolster public endorsement of judicial independence in previously unappreciated ways. We fielded surveys in the United States (US), Germany, Poland, and Hungary, countries which diverge in the extent to which the environments are hospitable or hostile to high courts, and whose publics vary greatly in both their awareness of courts and perceptions of executive influence with the judiciary. We suggest that in hospitable contexts, awareness correlates with support for judicial independence, but said association depends on perceptions of executive influence. In hostile contexts where executive interference is common, more aware citizens are more apt to perceive this meddling, and although it might undermine trust in the judicial authority, it does not diminish their demand for judicial independence. Together, these findings underscore that public awareness and support for judicial independence are greatly informed by the political environment in which high courts reside.

We study the value of foreign judges and foreign case citations for emerging courts in postcolonial democracies, with a specific focus on the Hong Kong Court of Final Appeals (HKCFA). The HKCFA, Hong Kong’s highest appellate court since the transfer of its sovereignty to China, features foreign judges as full members of the court. Using a novel dataset of all publicly available HKCFA decisions from 1997 to 2020, we show that there is a significantly higher number of foreign case citations in cases where foreign judges have participated. Further analyses show that this correlation is stronger where the Hong Kong government is a disputing party, and more specifically, where the court rules in favor of the Hong Kong government. The findings are consistent with the possibility that foreign judges’ expertise in foreign case law is relevant for upholding the perception of the court’s independence from the executive branch. This explanation is in line with existing theories on the role of foreign judges on domestic courts.

How can autonomous apex courts with specific attitudes and role conceptions counter executive aggrandizement? This article theorizes two causal mechanisms through which justices can resist democratic erosion. The first mechanism involves apex courts employing judicial review to neutralize autocratic legalism by blocking strategies such as institutional conversion, replacement, and layering that executives use to expand their power. The second involves apex courts building coalitions within and beyond the judiciary, enabling diverse actors – including judges, political parties, the media, and NGOs – to leverage their unique resources against executive encroachment. I conceptualize these two mechanisms by combining theory-building process tracing with counterfactual analysis of an unlikely case of democratic resilience: Argentina from 2007 to 2015. Drawing on evidence from 125 elite interviews, over a thousand newspaper articles, hundreds of state documents, memoirs, and other primary sources, this article demonstrates how the Supreme Court nullified President Cristina Kirchner’s attempts to undermine freedom of expression and judicial independence, thereby contributing to democratic resilience.

Why would authoritarian rulers allow for an independent judiciary that could constrain their power? This study extends the insurance theory of judicial independence to autocratic contexts, arguing that when leaders perceive a higher risk of losing office, they become more likely to tolerate or create independent courts as a safeguard against potential post-exit reprisals. Using a novel two-stage analytical approach, I construct a hazard rate for each country year from the Geddes et al. (2014) autocratic regime dataset, based on factors directly observable to autocratic leaders. This hazard rate serves as a proxy for perceived risk of losing power. My findings provide robust evidence that higher perceived risk is significantly associated with greater judicial independence in autocratic regimes, even when controlling for economic development, regime longevity, and court age. This research offers crucial insights into autocratic governance, demonstrating that promoting judicial independence can be a calculated strategy for regime survival rather than merely a democratic concession.

Court restructuring has become a salient national political issue, with proposals to increase the number of justices on the US Supreme Court gaining traction in response to various Court controversies. However, relatively little attention has been paid to state-level efforts, some successful, to increase the number of justices on state supreme courts. Although the number of justices on the US Supreme Court has not been changed since 1869, the size of most state supreme courts has been less stable. To place recent state supreme court expansions into context, this article analyzes the historical dynamics of state supreme court expansion. Analyzing an original dataset that includes every change made to the size of a state supreme court since 1789, it finds that court expansion has been more likely when the political competitiveness of a state is low and when state judicial selection and retention systems provide for lower levels of judicial independence.

No cooperative scheme in EU law has displayed bigger tensions between mutual trust and fundamental rights protection than the EAW system. Despite the requirement developed by the CJEU for national courts to trust each other and recognise each other’s arrest warrants, the reality on the ground has shown high levels of distrust between national courts regarding Member States’ alignment with core EU values. In this contribution, we analyze how the CJEU has managed such tensions in the EAW system. To that effect, we first put the Court’s EAW case law into context by examining the broader language of mutual trust used by the Court in other fields of EU law. In doing so, we point out how the Court has espoused different levels of lawful distrust to be exercised in different circumstances under the scope of application of mutual trust. Given that broader context, it is contradictory for the Court to mainly view mutual trust as a requirement rather than a reality in need of permanent and continuing justification between national authorities. The latter conception of mutual trust is more apt to be the basis of EU horizontal cooperation, which must be value-based and sincere according to the Treaties. Therefore, we propose a bidimensional account of mutual trust as a legal principle, one that accommodates both trust and distrust as tools for managing the uncertainty and dynamic nature of trust-based cooperation. Finally, we explore how such account of mutual (dis)trust can be concretised by the Court and other political institutions.

The past decade has seen the rise of the semi-authoritarian regimes within the European Union. EU law scholars are rightfully concerned that, in the absence of a meaningful response, this leads to an existential crisis for the Union, as these regimes threaten respect for the Union’s foundational values. The Union did respond to what it has framed as a rule of law crisis by means of a constitutional transformation, asserting Union power to protect judicial independence within the Member States even in areas previously thought beyond the reach of Union law. This paper contends that the Union’s response to the authoritarian threat is flawed for its legalist faith in law and courts. In institutional terms, it was the Court of Justice of the European Union, rather than the Union’s political branches, that took the lead in this transformation. In substantive terms, the Union has transformed its constitutional framework to protect the organisational infrastructure of the judiciary, but it failed to do the same in response to various other strategies in the authoritarian playbook. By framing the authoritarian threat as, above all else, a threat to the judiciary, the Union’s response contributes to the reification of political debate at Union level and risks the alienation of the European polity.

There are two contrasting claims regarding the Hungarian judiciary. The Government asserts that it is in the best shape, while many other voices label it as captured or dependent. This article shows how both of these claims can be true, depending on the interplay between formality and informality and shows how a few small loopholes allow some actors to rig the judicial system. Therefore, the Hungarian judiciary is similar to Schrödinger’s cat, which is claimed to be dead and alive at the same time.

The synergy between formality and informality requires a network of a handful of trusted people in managerial positions to administer case allocation, promotion, and disciplinary systems, which seem to be very effective tools. Few small technical loopholes and some special remedies suffice to micromanage important cases precisely because key positions are captured which work as gatekeepers or emergency brakes. Most of these tools are legal in a very formal technical sense of the word because they rely on acts of Parliament. A formal legalism, a very thin understanding of the Rule of law, and a majoritarian mindset serve as a legitimizing ideology for the whole legal system.

Most scholarly writings focus on the harmful effects of informal institutions. This article explores the positive influence of informal judicial institutions on the fundamental values of judicial systems. It develops a framework for assessing such institutions. The paper argues that the normative evaluation of informal judicial institutions is highly context-specific. Depending on their historical trajectories, different jurisdictions may emphasize different interests. Because of this, when evaluating informal judicial institutions, balancing the same values may yield different results in different jurisdictions. The recent trend towards formalization, supported by supranational institutions, goes hand-in-hand with the spreading narrative of good governance, emphasizing principles such as transparency or inclusion, principles that generally stand in tension with informality. This article cautions against emerging supranational templates insensitive to local practice.

The Israeli democracy regulates the operation of the judiciary through the constraints of formal rules that check the political actors, the individual judges, and the judiciary. Basic laws, laws and regulations prescribe the operation of every subject. Yet beyond these formal rules, informal institutions and practices are sometimes equally important in the operation of the judiciary, as they are in any constitutional system. In Israel, some of these informal institutions are crucial for the flourishing of democracy and the rule of law, through their protection of judicial independence from external political interference. The imminent possibility that political actors may set some of them aside is nothing less than a potential transformation in the constitutional order. Over the past few decades, judges and court administrators have introduced other internal informal institutions in the administration of the Israeli Judiciary, which qualify formal judicial accountability mechanisms in ways that may prove to be detrimental to democratic principles. This article discusses informal institutions that are important in the operation of the Israeli judiciary, separating the former external kind that are conducive to the rule of law—such as the illegitimacy of political and partisan considerations in judicial appointments—and whose disregard may signal democratic decay from the latter internal kind that may prove detrimental to the courts—such as opaquely changing who is responsible for court administration. Lastly, the political attempt to change informal institutions, detailed herein, can be seen as a harbinger of the current attempt to change formal institutions in the constitutional status of the judiciary in Israel.

This article uses the case study of Slovakia and its lackluster experience with a judge-dominated judicial council to demonstrate that formal institutions have only limited impact on the ideational level. We show that the transformation of the Slovak post-communist judiciary relied on the presumption that judges‘ interests are automatically complementary to principles of the rule of law. Therefore, the majority of implemented reforms insulated the judiciary from the political branches of power, but allowed strong hierarchical relationships inside the courts to exist. In contrast to international expectations, judicial authorities used judicial empowerment to create or strengthen competing informal practices, which helped them to maximize their power. We argue that the lack of internalization of judicial independence might explain why institutional self-governance reforms failed to trigger changes in the professional role conception of judges in regimes riddled with deeply embedded informal institutions. In order to tackle this problem, we propose that future research on the relationship between institutional safeguards and decisional judicial independence should focus on the process through which actors internalize new institutional incentives.

Judges communicate outside of the courtroom on a regular basis. They give speeches at universities and to societies; appear before select committees; write for a range of publications; and engage in both media and outreach activities. Existing literature has charted the value and perils of such extrajudicial communication. This paper contributes an explanation of what motivates judges towards such communication, and what shapes their discourse. The work draws on 13 semi-structured interviews with senior serving and recently retired judges, along with an extensive range of examples of judicial speech beyond the bench. It argues that extrajudicial communication is shaped by a shared conception amongst the judicial community of what is appropriate. This conception of propriety is principally motivated by a communal pursuit of sustaining public confidence in the judicial office. The conception also informs the limits of appropriate discourse and establishes the ramifications for breach.