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. [...]

What factors explain compliance with monetary damages awarded by the Inter-American Court of Human Rights (IACtHR)? States comply with the payment of monetary damages at higher

rates than other forms of reparation. However, the higher compliance rate belies the significant variation in time to compliance with the payment of monetary awards. [...]

How might constitution-makers write “transformative constitutions”? Scholars and policymakers have looked to constitutional design as a mechanism for societal change, for

example, promoting democracy, equality, and social rights. In these efforts, accountability has most often been limited to government actors. [...]

Much of the research on public trust in courts focuses on countries with strong rule of law traditions and clear judicial norms. Less is known about such attitudes in young

democracies with developing judicial institutions. To address this, we examine public confidence in Ghana’s court system. [...]

Since 1974, two out of every five constitutions (40.3%) were prepared via processes that included public consultation. The reasons for adopting these participatory mechanisms,

however, are largely unexplored. I argue that public consultation is a tool for elite contestation of power. [...]

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 [...]

International courts are increasingly serving as bulwarks of democracy. These courts, however, often depend on the cooperation of the very governments they seek to hold accountable,

exposing them to potential retaliation for attempting to constrain their behavior. [...]

The number of women on high courts across the globe has been steadily increasing. Recent estimates found that women now make up 61% of the judiciary in European countries (Organisation

for Economic Co-operation and Development 2019). The large number of women now serving in judicial positions has resulted in a changing demographic makeup of courts. [...]

How can citizens in authoritarian regimes exercise oversight of the legal system? I examine police and court monitoring, bottom-up oversight activities popular in pre-war Russia

(2012–2022). Monitoring pushes the state to honor commitments it has made in its own laws, taking advantage of the authoritarian state’s need for information [...]

Proposals to change the institutional features of national high courts have been on the agenda recently in the United States and Israel. Using insights about endowment effects

and prospect theory from behavioral economics, we theorize about how citizens may think about benefits from high courts and how those views can influence their support [...]