William Raftery
To preserve both its actual and apparent impartiality in resolving disputes, the judicial branch must be more distant from the political influences of citizen majorities and special interests than are the legislative and executive branches. While the function of the courts in reviewing and interpreting the law sometimes requires decisions that are unpopular and lead to criticism by the legislature, opportunities for interbranch relations can be augmented and the conditions for conflict avoided by appropriate exercise of judicial restraint in the review of legislation and by more effective efforts to inform lawmakers about the appropriate function of the courts and the potential impact of proposed legislation.
Links to related online resources are listed below. Non-digitized publications may be borrowed from the NCSC Library; call numbers are provided.
Legal notes examining a question of seperation of power between the Connecticut General Assembly and the Connecticut Supreme Court.
This study invokes the common space scores of executives and senators to generate a number of alternative preference point positions for U.S. District Court judges. Measures that account for cyclical changes in interbranch appointment relationships are more effective for temporally lengthy large N samples. The magnitude of these ideological effects is modest, but not substantial.
This article examines the legislative acts aimed at limiting judicial review of immigration cases and the resulting separation-of-power issues.
Ongoing immigration to the United States, along with increasing home-grown demographic diversity within out society, have dramatically increased the need for courts to become more culturally competent and to address the complicated interplay among federal, state, and local immigration law, policy, and practice.
This article provides examples of current attempts at judicial legislation to interpret the No Child Left Behind Act.
This guidebook is a part of the much larger research project "Legislative-Judicial Partnership." This report addresses issues such as the usage of legislative liaisons, judicial impact statements, long-range court planning, and educational programs.
The 2008 economic crisis could test the relationship between the three branches of governement in terms of both funding state court operations and other programs while maintaining and adequate system of checks and balances.
This well-written book addresses many of the fundamental issues of state judiciaries. The book is divided into four major sections including "The Administrative Requirements of Judicial Independence", "The Obstacles to Judicial Branch Control of Internal Operations," "Creating an Independent Judicial Branch: The Court Reform Movement." and "The Next Reform Phase."
The staff memorandum provides information on American judicial independence. Many courageous and now highly praised decisions of the utmost importance to our nation, which were initially unpopular, have been made possible because of the independence of the American judiciary.
This staff memorandum discuses the relation of judicial selection methods, particularly judicial elections, to judicial independence. Concerns related to attacks on judicial candidates and attempts by business and political interests to influence judicial elections are examined.