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Why do we witness variation in the level of judicial attention to rights litigation across countries and over time? Traditional explanations emphasize the constitutional recognition of rights, judicial leadership, and the development in society of a sophisticated “support structure for legal mobilization,” as key covariates of these phenomena. Yet, there is a dearth of quantitative empirical analyses that evaluate these explanations comparatively and actually test their relative influence on trends of rights litigation and protection. Perhaps the most important lacuna in this regard is an assessment of the influence of institutional conditions and modifications in bringing about or facilitating the transformation of the rights scene. To contribute to closing this gap, this article empirically assesses the short and long term impacts of ideology, support structure, and institutional protection on changes in the presence of rights litigation in the dockets of the High Courts of several democracies with Common Law systems. To this purpose, we perform time-series analyses on data from the High Courts Judicial Database and the Spaeth U.S. Supreme Court Database. Our analyses indicate that once one properly models temporal effects, increasing support structures do not influence increases in rights litigation. Rather, specific institutional changes and ideological influences play a significant role in the High Courts’ attention to individual rights. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper examines the struggle between the legislative and judicial branches by focusing specifically on congressional influences on the behavior of federal judges. We argue that Congress may constrain individual judicial behavior by passing statutes containing detailed language. To test this thesis we borrow from the bureaucratic politics literature to introduce and test a new measure of statutory constraint. Using data from the U.S. Courts of Appeals we find that appellate court behavior is constrained significantly by statutory language, although this constraint is asymmetric across ideology. We discover substantial differences between Democratic and Republican appointees both in terms of statutory constraint and ideological voting. The data indicate judges appointed by Democratic presidents are constrained by statutory language in criminal cases. Similarly, Republican appointees are constrained by statutes in civil rights cases. Yet, neither Democrats nor Republicans are constrained in economic cases. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Following the collapse of communist rule in Central and Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union, constitutional designers codified rules establishing independent judiciaries. To what degree do these constitutional and statutory guarantees of independence reflect the actual behavior of courts? Our analysis demonstrates that official judicial power does not predict expressions of judicial review—overturning legislation in whole or in part. Rather, exogenous factors, including economic conditions, executive power, identity of the litigants and legal issues, influence the likelihood that courts will nullify laws. Our findings should caution both scholars and institutional designers. Both formal and informal factors create the parameters in which courts operate. Although courts have become more powerful institutions in the post-communist era, they face a diverse set of constraints on independent action. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article was written as a rejoinder to a response by Professor Charles R. Epp about an article on rights. The article discusses civil rights and liberties and the support structures that sustain them. The article discusses how rights litigation is affected by these support mechanisms and the research methods examining it. The article describes methodology related to time-series analyses, error correction models, and conditions and correlations. Information is also provided on the financial aspects of litigation campaigns.