Trends in State Courts is an annual, peer-reviewed publication that highlights innovative practices in critical areas that are of interest to courts, and often serves as a guide for developing new initiatives and programs and supporting policy decisions. This year's Trends looks at leading during a pandemic, virtual remote interpreting, online dispute resolution, case management systems, new data systems for drug treatment courts, legal icons as a plain language tool, family justice initiative, the impact of labeling youth sexual offenders, parental alienation, divorces among senior citizens, state court collaboration across systems, what happens when a judge's personal opinion collides with the law, building trust, and racial justice.

The term judicial opinion can be a misnomer as rarely are judges true feelings on legal issues and the work they do made available to the public. Judges are constrained when writing decisions to follow the law and leave personal commentary aside. Through a series of revealing interviews, this book gathers empirical data from judges and justices fr

Trends in the Judiciary: Interviews with Judges from Across the Globe, Volume Four, provides insights into the lives, working environments, and social milieus of a select group of judges. These legal luminaries, often viewed as pedantic in their ontology, serve the crucial role of preserving the human rights of individuals. This text offers detailed data emanating from the narratives of judges who were interviewed by a wide range of academicians, from emerging and mid-career scholars to professionals and established professors. The narratives of the judges are interspersed with research data and country details in an effort to enhance the knowledge base of the readership. Judges from Asia, Africa, the Caribbean, Europe, the Pacific Islands, New Zealand, North America, and South America all contributed to this text by sharing information on their careers as well as insights as they traversed their profession. The readership of this manuscript will experience the thought processes of judges in relation to the social, cultural, economic, and political context of their respective nations and the gender issues, subtle attempts at juridical control, dealing with powerful criminals, and the lives of judges who have other interests besides "interpreting and applying the law." The international, cross-cultural perspectives presented in this book should be of significant interest to academics, practitioners, students, criminologists, and the criminal justice community, and those interested in comparative legal studies across the globe.

This first book to examine the lives and work of nineteenth-century southern judges explores the emergence of a southern judiciary and the effects of regional peculiarities and attitudes on legal development. Drawing on the judicial opinions and private correspondence of six chief justices whose careers span both the region and the century, Timothy S. Huebner analyzes their conceptions of their roles and the substance of their opinions related to cases involving homicide, economic development, federalism, and race. Examining judges both on and off the bench--as formulators of law and as citizens whose lives were intertwined with southern values--Huebner reveals the tensions that sometimes arose out of loyalties to sectional principles and national professional consciousness. He exposes the myth of southern leniency in appellate homicide decisions and also shows how the southern judiciary contributed to and reflected larger trends in American legal development. This book adds to our understanding of both southern distinctiveness and American legal culture.

New and emerging technologies are reshaping justice systems and transforming the role of judges. The impacts vary according to how structural reforms take place and how courts adapt case management processes, online dispute resolution systems and justice apps. Significant shifts are also occurring with the development of more sophisticated forms of Artificial Intelligence that can support judicial work or even replace judges. These developments, together with shifts towards online court processes are explored in Judges, Technology and Artificial Intelligence.

Presents a novel theory explaining how and why politicians and lawyers politicise courts.

This book critically examines the evolving global trend of judicial activism with particular reference to Bangladesh. It constructs judicial activism as a golden-mean adjudicative technology, standing between excessive judicial assertion and unacceptable judicial passivity that may leave injustices un-redressed. It argues that judicial balancing between over-activism and meek administration of justice should essentially be predicated upon domestic conditions, and the needs and fundamental public values of the judges’ respective society. Providing cross-jurisdictional empirical evidence, the study demonstrates that judicial activism, steered towards improving justice and grounded in one’s societal specificities, can be exercised in a morally and legally legitimate form and without rupturing the balance of powers among the state organs. This study has sought to displace the myth of judicial activism as constitutional transgression by “unelected” judges, arguing that judicial activism is quite different from excessivism. It is argued and shown that a particular judge or judiciary turns out to be activist when other public functionaries avoid or breach their constitutional responsibilities and thus generate injustice and inequality. The study treats judicial activism as the conscientious exposition of constitutional norms and enforcement of public duties of those in positions of power. The study assesses whether Bangladeshi judges have been striking the correct balance between over-activism and injudicious passivity. Broadly, the present book reveals judicial under-activism in Bangladesh and offers insights into causes for this. It is argued that the existing milieu of socio-political injustices and over-balance of constitutional powers in Bangladesh calls for increased judicial intervention and guidance, of course in a balanced and pragmatic manner, which is critical for good governance and social justice. “Writing about judicial activism easily gets shackled by fussy and pedestrian debates about what judges may or may not do as unelected agents of governance. The book . . . goes much beyond such reductionist pedestrianisation of law, for it courageously lifts the debate into the skies of global legal realism. The analysis perceptively addresses bottlenecks of justice, identifying shackles and mental blocks in our own minds against activising concerns for justice for the common citizen.” —Prof Werner Menski (Foreword)