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Over the course of this article we analyse the complete set of patent cases filed at the Patents Court in England and Wales during the period 2000–2008. The data cover all types of patent-related cases brought before the Patents County Court, the Patents Court at the High Court, the Court of Appeal, as well as the House of Lords/Supreme Court. We combine the detailed information on court cases with information on the patents in dispute as well as firm-level data for the litigating parties. Our analysis looks at patent cases from three different angles: litigant-level, patent-level, and case-level. In this respect we draw a number of conclusions about the types of claims brought, and by whom, as well as the value of the patents litigated and the case outcomes.

The Inter-American Court of Human Rights decided four cases in recent years that represent a positive step for freedom of expression in nations that belong to the Organization of American States. In 2004 and again in 2008, the court stopped short of adopting a standard that would require proof of actual malice in criminal defamation cases brought by public officials. In 2009, however, the court seemed to adopt the actual malice rule without calling it that. The court's progress toward actual malice is chronicled in this article. The article concludes that the court's decision not to explicitly use the phrase “actual malice” may be a positive development for freedom of expression in the Americas.

The article reveals the problem of applying the principle of the social state in the practice of the U.S. Supreme Court.

The Children's Court is a critical social institution and important forum of social work practice. It decides important legal and social issues relating to children and families. This article reports the findings of a study of the views of Victoria's Children's Court magistrates on the current status and challenges faced by the Children's Court as well as possible reforms that have recently been canvassed in Australia and overseas. This study was part of a larger “national assessment” of Australia's Children's Courts. The focus of this article is the Court's criminal jurisdiction. The findings point to concrete directions for change, for example, in aspects of its inputs and throughputs. In addition, the magistrates supported a shift in the Court's orientation to that of a therapeutic, jurisprudence-informed, problem-solving court. Findings also point to the need for research on the understanding of court processes and decisions by defendants and their families.

The study of U.S. state supreme courts has been significantly constrained by a lack of available data. To remedy this deficiency, this article introduces an original data set of every state supreme...

More than thirty years ago, the Supreme Court of the United States created a First Amendment right of access to criminal trials in Richmond Newspapers, Inc. v. Virginia. At the time—and in the Supreme Court cases that immediately followed Richmond Newspapers—the assumption was that such a right of access would apply only to judicial proceedings. This article examines a small but significant body of case law that extends the First Amendment right of access to criminal proceedings to new venues far removed from courtrooms. Using the 2012 opinion of the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit in Leigh v. Salazar as an analytical springboard, this article analyzes how the so-called experience-and-logic test fashioned by the high Court in Press-Enterprise Co. v. Superior Court in 1986 is being applied in such cases. Cases like Leigh also provide an excellent opportunity for courts to clarify precisely the nature and extent of the history required to find qualified rights of access given the relati...

How does the Supreme Court serve the “common good”? What is the Court's responsibility, as the ultimate interpreter of the Constitution, in our constitutional system of government? This essay explores that question with an eye on the recent performance of the Court in highly controversial and divisive cases. What explains the Court's decisions in cases involving such issues as campaign finance regulation, gun control, abortion, affirmative action, health care reform, voting rights, and even the 2000 presidential election? This essay argues that there is a right and a wrong way for the Supreme Court to interpret and apply the Constitution; and whereas the Warren Court properly understood its responsibilities, the Court in more recent decades has adopted a less legitimate and more troubling mode of constitutional interpretation.

In the Romantic period, publishers frequently needed guidance on legal problems. These problems ranged from concerns in most kinds of commerce, such as leasing a place of business, to concerns in the book trade, such as questions of copyright or libel. The success of "respectable" booksellers like Longman, Hurst, Rees, Orme, and Brown or John Murray depended upon owning and protecting their exclusive rights to literary properties. Although Murray faced three civil actions for libel, all involving articles in the Quarterly Review, and he was convicted of criminal libel in 1829, most of his legal activity concerned matters related to copyright. Murray, like Longman, was advised by Sharon Turner (1768-1847), who was an attorney and solicitor as well as the author of a distinguished History of the Anglo-Saxons (1799-1805). Technically, an "attorney" was licensed to work in common law and a "solicitor" was licensed to work in equity, but almost all attorneys were solicitors and almost all solicitors were attorneys, and early-19th century practice was to employ the terms interchangeably. Turner's work with Murray can be reconstructed from the 120 letters he (or by his son and business partner Alfred) wrote to Murray in the John Murray Archive, now housed at the National Library of Scotland. (Smiles or Isaac have summarized or quoted a few of the letters). I have been studying this correspondence for the book I am writing, titled Lord Byron on Trial: Literature and the Law in the Romantic Period, which explores the relationship between written expression and legal inhibitions and reveals the uncoordinated, inconsistent, and often contradictory manner in which these inhibitions functioned. Much of a legal advisor's work predicted the consequences of a prospective course of action. Because Turner was an attorney, not a barrister, his predictions were more tentative than if he were a member of the bar, and he and Murray repeatedly needed the insight that could be supplied by a man who attended the courts in Westminster Hall day after day. Sometimes Turner needed the opinion of a barrister who practiced in courts of common law; sometimes, the opinion of a barrister who practiced in courts of equity. In courts of law, such as the Court of King's Bench, a plaintiff might pursue an action for damage. Courts of equity, such as the Court of Chancery, were the only courts that could compel strict performance (and thus might force someone to fulfill a contract) or could issue an injunction prohibiting an act (and thus might order someone not to sell a book). The practice of equity in this period was dominated by Lord Eldon, the conservative statesman and lawyer who served as Lord Chancellor from 1801 to 1806 and again from 1807 to 1827. Not only did equity and law wield different weapons but also they often acted upon different principles. In 1827, author Thomas Crofton Croker tried to back out of an agreement to supply a book to Murray, and the agreement had never been formalized. Turner informed Croker's attorney that although Murray was powerless in common law because the author had not assigned him the copyright, the Court of Chancery would nonetheless issue an injunction because of the promises made in Croker's letters (Turner to Goulburn, June 16, 1827). Before Murray published George Birkbeck, Henry Adcock, and James Adcock's The Steam-Engine Theoretically and Practically Displayed (1827), he needed to be certain that the authors were free from earlier obligations to another publisher. Turner consulted two barristers, one practicing in equity, the other in law, and he reported back to Murray that while Lancelot Shadwell "thinks you are safe in Equity," nonetheless "Mr Bayley perceives some danger at the Common Law [...]" (Turner to Murray, July 8, 1826, Ms. 41210). Publishers needed predictions on what courts would do, yet even the most well-founded predictions were tentative and unreliable. For example, while Shadwell was an authority on the proclivities Eldon displayed while sitting in the Court of Chancery, he could not know if the Chancellor were likely to be influenced by a recent discussion in the Cabinet, or if Eldon had heard rumors concerning a matter before it was brought before him. …

While Congress can attempt to overrule constitutional decisions of the Supreme Court by initiating the constitutional amendment process, an amendment is rarely a practicable option. Instead, Congress regularly tries to modify the impact of constitutional decisions with ordinary legislation. I analyze policy-based responses to the Supreme Court’s constitutional decisions that were initiated in Congress between 1995 and 2010. For each responsive proposal, I consider the relationship between the proposed legislation and the Court’s legal holding and the relationship between the proposal and the public policy associated with the Court’s decision. I find that Congress enjoys considerable success in reversing the policy impacts of the Court’s decisions but is limited in its ability to overcome the Court’s legal rules. When members of Congress dislike an opinion announced by the United States Supreme Court, they can express their disapproval in several ways. Congressional responses range from the nearly costless issuance of public statements voicing criticism of the Court to the daunting task of shepherding proposed constitutional amendments through Congress in the hopes of sending amendments to the states that will overcome the Court’s constitutional interpretations. Other legislative proposals may reverse statutory interpretations adopted by the Supreme Court or revise policies that have been declared unconstitutional in the hopes of satisfying judicial scrutiny. Instead of attempting to alter the policy announced by the Court, members of Congress may engage in institutional attacks 1 designed to weaken the Court. I consider the use of ordinary legislation to limit or modify the impact of constitutional decisions of the Supreme Court. I call these proposals “policy-based responses” to differentiate them from institutional attacks, which are often assumed to be Congress’s preferred or only available vehicle for responding to the Court’s constitutional decisions. I argue that policy-based responses are a regular

Although nowadays most courts publish decisions on the internet, substantial differences exist between European countries regarding such publication. These differences not only pertain to the extent with which judgments are published and anonymised, but also to their metadata, searchability and reusability. This article, written by Marc van Opijnen, Ginevra Peruginelli, Eleni Kefali and Monica Palmirani, contains a synthesis of a comprehensive comparative study on the publication of court decisions within all Member States of the European Union. Specific attention is paid on the legal and policy frameworks governing case law publication, actual practices, data protection issues, Open Data policies as well as the state of play regarding the implementation of the European Case Law Identifier.

The article titled “Role of the European Court Of Human Rights in the Turkish Constitutional Court’s Rulings Regarding the Freedom of Association” illustrates the impact that the European human rights standards have had on the Turkish Constitutional Court in Turkey. First, the article briefly examines the salient characteristics of the 1982 Constitution regarding rights and freedoms and the place of international human rights law in domestic law. Second, it discusses the Turkish Constitutional Court’s approach to the freedom of association. This article reveals that the European human rights documents and the rulings of the European Court of Human Rights are indispensable elements for Turkish legislation and for the Turkish Constitutional Court. Indeed, the Constitutional Court’s approach is critically important in providing consistency between domestic law and international human rights standards. However, it seems that sometimes the Court hesitates to fully embrace them by accepting the broad discretionary power of Parliament.

The 2016 Presidential and Senate elections raise the possibility that a conservative, life-tenured Supreme Court will preside for years over a politically dynamic majority. This threatens to weaken the public’s already fragile confidence in the Court. By lowering the political stakes of both national elections and its own decisions, federalism may enable the Court to defuse some of the most explosive controversies it hears. Federalism offers a second-best solution, even if neither conservatives nor liberals can impose a national political agenda. However, principled federalism arguments are tricky. They are structural, more prudential than legal or empirical. Regardless of ideology, a bias toward federal power is hard-wired into the modern judicial appointment process. Once on the bench, Justices see an increasingly elite bar of Washington D.C. specialists steeped in federal practice, even when hearing cases concerning state sovereignty. These are problems for the Court, despite its likely sympathy for federalism arguments in years to come. This article suggests one solution: help the Court hear the states. Relatively minor reforms to the Court’s approach in cases impacting state sovereignty could harness the politics of state attorneys general to help the Court hear all states more clearly, facilitate a more principled federalism, and depoliticize the Court itself. States cannot help protect the Court from politicization, however, if their attorneys general fall victim to the same national polarizing forces that threaten the Court. Any reforms to help the Court hear the states better, therefore, must also help the states keep their voices strong and independent.

Ever since Justice Scalia passed away last February, the Supreme Court has been composed of eight Justices equally divided among Republicans and Democrats. This paper argues that Congress should permanently set the number of Justices at eight and require that at all times there are four Republicans and four Democrats on the Court. A permanent, evenly-divided Court will work harder to reach narrower decisions in its hardest cases and will be less able to impose its ideological agendas on the American people while at the same still have the tools necessary to maintain the supremacy and uniformity of federal law. To the extent the Justices do deadlock on a case, the issues will be resolved by court of appeals judges who are much more politically, educationally, and geographically diverse than the Justices.This proposal to limit the Court's power, unlike abolishing term limits or requiring a super-majority of Justices to strike down laws, does not require a constitutional amendment (the original number of Justices was six). Although the President could nominate any person he desires, even if it disrupts the Court's balance, the Senate could refuse to confirm any nominee who would lead to one of the political parties having a majority of Justices on the Court. This paper spells out the details of this proposal and explains both how it could be easily implemented and why it benefits both political parties, the Congress, the President, and the American people.Preexisting intellectual commitments or interpretative theories have not and cannot limit the Court's power. It is well past time to experiment with structural changes that will make it more difficult for the Justices to strike down state and federal laws based on ideological disagreement instead of a demonstration of clear inconsistency with the Constitution.

This paper therefore advances the theory that each non-Quebec “region”, as they are currently recognized, might need at least one appointee each in order to ensure the Court has functioning and legitimacy as a federal and bijural institution. This theory has the added benefit of providing the Governor-in-Council with flexibility in making appointments that meet other roles of the Court, such as adjudicating on Charter rights and aboriginal law.

The case law the EU Court of Justice has issued on non-discrimination is particularly developed in the area of discrimination based on nationality or sex, and lately also in matters concerning sexual orientation, disability, and ethnic origin. This case law is rich in lessons on fundamental issues, such as the prohibition for employers to publicly announce discriminatory hiring policies, the definition of disability, the exclusion barring same-sex partners from access to employment-related benefits and services, and the scheme for burden of proof. This chapter suggests that while the Court’s approach is not entirely clear, it has nonetheless made allowance for social progress in protecting victims of discrimination. The Court has thus contributed to realizing the values on which the European Union is founded.

Erie killed general law. Due to statutory, constitutional, and fairness constraints, a federal court generally must apply state substantive law in diversity and supplemental jurisdiction cases.Since our nation’s founding, however, federal courts have treated equity as an independent branch of general law, binding of its own force in all cases that come before them. In Guaranty Trust Co. v. York, the Supreme Court held that, notwithstanding Erie, federal courts may continue to rely on traditional principles of equity derived from the English Court of Chancery to determine the availability of equitable relief, such as injunctions, receiverships, and equitable liens, in cases arising under state law. This so-called “equitable remedial rights doctrine” is based on an anachronistic misunderstanding of the nature of the federal equity power. This Article offers a bold new approach to understanding the nature and limits of the federal equity power. There is no single body of equity law that federal courts must apply in all cases that come before them. In cases arising under state law, there is no basis in the Constitution, federal law, or Federal Rules of Civil Procedure for courts to impose their own equitable standards for relief. Rights and remedies are inextricably intertwined. The manner in which state-created rights are protected is as much a matter of substantive state policy as the state’s initial creation and allocation of those rights. A federal court must apply state statutes and precedents — not uniform, centrally devised federal standards — to determine the availability of equitable relief for state-law claims.Conversely, for cases arising under federal statutes, the equitable principles that apply are a question of statutory interpretation. When a federal law authorizes equitable relief, a court may presume Congress intended to incorporate traditional equitable principles, absent a clear statement to the contrary in the law's text or legislative history. And for constitutional cases, federal courts may presumptively apply traditional equitable principles as a matter of constitutional common law, unless Congress chooses to displace it. Thus, contrary to received wisdom, there is no single federal equity law. The scope of equitable relief a federal court may afford depends on the underlying law from which a claim arose.

This paper examines whether the Court Jurisdiction and Proceedings Transfer Act has readied Canada to adopt the 2005 Hague Choice of Court Convention. Reviewing the Convention as well as previous and current law and cases on forum selection clauses in common law Canada, including the very recent Supreme Court decision in Douez v Facebook, yields two conclusions. First, there are existing interpretive challenges flowing from gaps in the CJPTA with respect to jurisdictional clauses that need to be addressed. Second, the principles governing forum selection clauses in Canada are largely consistent with those put forward in the Hague Convention and should not be perceived as obstacles to its adoption.

The decision of the California Supreme Court in Bristol-Myers Squibb Co. v. Superior Court, 1 Cal.5th 783 (2016), is fully consistent with the due process standards recognized by this Court in International Shoe Co. v. Washington, 326 U.S. 310 (1945), as well as with recent doctrinal developments applying and elaborating those standards. The state high court’s substantial connection standard bridges the jurisdictional lacuna between specific and general jurisdiction and operates in a manner that is fully consistent with the federal common law doctrine of pendent personal jurisdiction. We, therefore, urge this Court to affirm the decision of the California Supreme Court.

The Chief Justice of the United States Supreme Court authors many of the most important opinions coming out of the Court. The prestige of authoring an important policy decision, and the value that such an opinion adds to the legacy of the Chief Justice’s Court, plays an important and strategic role in the Court’s opinion authorship dynamics and the policy outcomes of the Court. We present a Supreme Court decision-making model that, within the confines of legal doctrine, incorporates the authorship utility of the Chief Justice (and senior associate justices who hold secondary, yet important, property rights over authorship). New predictions emerge about who authors the Court’s opinion, what case outcome is chosen by the justices, which legal doctrines are chosen, and which decisions are unanimous among the justices. We illustrate aspects of the model with recent Supreme Court decisions involving health care and campaign financing.

Since 1831, Indian nations have been viewed as Domestic Dependent Nations located within the geographical boundaries of the United States. Although Chief Justice John Marshall acknowledged that Indian nations had a certain amount of sovereignty, the exact extent of such sovereignty as well as the place of tribes within the federal system has remained ill-defined. This Article examines what has been the role of the Supreme Court in integrating Indian nations as the third Sovereign within our federalist system. The Article accomplishes this task by examining the Court’s Indian law record in the last 30 years. The comprehensive survey of Indian law decisions indicates that the Court has had difficulties upholding the federal policy of respecting tribal sovereignty and encouraging tribal self-government. After categorizing the cases between victories and losses, the Article divides the cases into four categories: Federal common law, statutory interpretation, constitutional law, and procedural law. The cases are then further divided into four general areas: 1. Tribal Sovereign/Political rights, 2. Economic Rights (treaty/property rights), 3. Rights derived from the trust relationship, and 4. Cultural/Religious rights. The Article next focuses on the interaction between the Court and Congress concerning the incorporation of tribes as the third sovereign within the federalist system. This Part first evaluates Congress’s response to Supreme Court cases and then looks at the Court’s response to congressional legislation. The Article ends by arguing that through its disproportionate use of federal common law in its Indian law decisions, the Court has not attempted to reach a consensus with Congress about the place of Indian nations within our federalism. Instead, it has aimed to establish what the Court perceives should be the proper equilibrium between tribal interests on one hand and the non-Indian/state interests on the other.

In China, the court system consists of four-level ordinary courts that lie at the core of the system, special courts and military courts. The next higher court to the first instance court has appellate jurisdiction as the second instance, and the decision by this court is final and cannot be appealed a second time, which explains the so-called ‘two-instance trial system’ in China. The Supreme People’s Court sits at the apex of the court system pyramid. Its functions fundamentally focus on trying influential cases, formulating interpretations of the law and regulatory documents within the scope of its official duties as well as supervising lower levels of courts. In respect of adjudication, the Supreme People’s Court specifically concentrates on screening petitions for reopening proceedings and on trying such proceedings. The reopening proceedings aim to correct substantial and significant procedural flaws of judicial decisions. With regard to its interpretive function, the Court interprets the law and its ‘judicial interpretations’ have binding effect for all courts throughout the country. From the political perspective, with regard to its supervisory function, the Supreme People’s Court strongly influences the lower courts through its regulations in respect of policy related to the justice system and judicial reform, so as to achieve a better administration of justice.

The jurisdictional relationship between African states and the African Court of Justice and Human and Peoples’ Rights and between the latter Court and the International Criminal Court is not entirely clear. While the Malabo Protocol (Annex) has borrowed the complementarity principle from the Rome Statute, the Protocol does not indicate that states’ investigations or prosecutions should be genuine, in order to render a case inadmissible. Moreover, the Malabo Protocol (Annex) is completely silent on the African Court’s relationship to the International Criminal Court. This chapter first discusses whether the leaving out of the term “genuinely” bears any consequences on the assessment of the quality of the performance of states in respect of investigation and prosecution of international crimes. Next, it considers two alternative scenario’s—one in which the International Criminal Court is hierarchically superior to the African Court of Justice and Human and Peoples’ Rights and one in which both courts cooperate as equal partners. The author concludes that the latter model would be feasible if the International Criminal Court and the African Court of Justice and Human and Peoples’ Rights move towards a “division of labor”.

In 2012 the International Criminal Court (ICC) celebrates its ten-year anniversary since its establishment. It is fair to say that the current age of the Court reflects its present maturity. At the time of writing, the Court has finally rendered its first verdict, by condemning the Congolese warlord Thomas Lubanga for the conscription of child soldiers after a rather wobbly trial that took 6 years. In May 2011, the Court faced another unprecedented challenge. Four witnesses transferred from the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) to testify in the Lubanga and Katanga & Ngudjolo Chui (hereinafter: Katanga) trials, applied for asylum in the Netherlands. This matter, which was not anticipated in the Statute or secondary sources of ICC law, raises issues concerning the cooperation between the ICC, the Netherlands as host state and the DRC, and raises intriguing questions about the interaction of international criminal law and international refugee law.

As contemplated by the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court (‘Court’), the United Nations and the Court entered into a Relationship Agreement in 2004. The Relationship Agreement provides a framework for cooperation between the United Nations and the Court, including through logistical or administrative support to the Court, in particular in countries where the Prosecutor has opened investigations or is conducting preliminary examinations. The United Nations also provides substantive support and judicial assistance to the Court’s organs, in particular to the Prosecutor, but also increasingly now to the Defence, by making available documents and information generated or obtained by the United Nations and its various field presences. United Nations staff and experts have also been made available to the Court for interview and some have testified before the Court, for which the United Nations Secretary-General has to waive their immunity. This commentary provides an update on recent developments in two areas of cooperation between the United Nations and the court: information sharing, and contact with persons subject to warrants or summonses.

The article focuses on judicial politics in three international regimes. The courts of these regimes are trustee courts, operating in an environment of judicial supremacy with respect to states. An international trustee court meets three criteria: (1) the court is the authoritative interpreter of the regime’s law; (2) the court’s jurisdiction is compulsory; and (3) it is virtually impossible, in practice, for contracting states to reverse the court’s important rulings. After developing a theory of trusteeship, we turn to how judges have used their powers. Although there is variation, each court has engaged in “majoritarian activism,” producing law that reflects standard practices or a high degree of state consensus but that would not have been adopted by states under unanimity decision rules. Majoritarian activism helps judges to develop the law progressively, to mitigate potential legitimacy problems, and to render efforts at curbing the growth of their authority improbable or ineffective.

The article examines a detailed case involving an accusation of witchcraft against the serf Gerasim Fedotov, which was heard before the Moscow Court of Equity in 1853. In comparison with other cases of witchcraft in the four decades between the 1820s and 1850s, the one involving Fedotov provides a window onto popular beliefs in witchcraft and sorcery intertwined with Russian Orthodox practices, the medical profession’s rationalist arguments against the power of quotidian magic, and the state’s intent on maintaining law and order without infringing upon serfowners’ rights. Ultimately, the autocratic state’s seemingly more enlightened prosecution of witchcraft as a superstition turned out to be unsuccessful in combating popular beliefs in sorcery, witchcraft, and divination.

Articles 5(3) and 34(6) of the Protocol to the African Charter on Human and Peoples’ Rights on the Establishment of an African Court on Human and Peoples’ Rights require that an application before the African Court on Human and Peoples’ Rights (the Court) will not be ‘received’ unless two conditions are fulfilled. First, the application must be filed against a State which has ratified the Protocol. Second, an application can be received only against a State which made an optional declaration accepting the competence of the Court to receive cases from Non Governmental organisations (NGOs) with observer status before the Commission and individuals. The vast majority of State parties to the Protocol have not filed (and are not likely to file in the near future) a declaration to allow NGOs and individuals, most likely to bring human rights cases before the Court, direct access to the Court. This article examines the impact of the limitation imposed on direct access to the Court by individuals and NGOs on the African Court’s jurisdiction by considering the applications decided by the Court since it started its operations in 2006 up to December 2012. It is argued that the limitation is a major challenge currently facing the Court and that it has adversely affected the exercise of the Court’s jurisdiction. It is concluded that allowing NGOs and individuals direct access to the Court will make a significant contribution to the attainment of the objectives of the African Charter and the Court’s Protocol.

The most prominent of the few stated criteria by which the Supreme Court decides to hear a case is the existence of a conflict among the lower courts. However, a lower court split does not automatically lead the Supreme Court to review a case, and the justices have often allowed lower court splits - and thereby the application of different legal standards across the country - to stand for long periods of time. What explains the Court's tolerance of conflict, and its eventual decision to resolve it? We model the Supreme Court's decision to intervene in a conflict as an optimal stopping problem. The Court faces a strategic trade-off between allowing conflict to continue while it learns about the implications of the possible policy choices and intervening to end a costly conflict between the lower courts. Our model provides the first theoretical framework for understanding when and how the Court decides to resolve lower court conflict.

A trio of Supreme Court decisions between 2002 and 2005 intensified debate over judicial reliance on foreign law. The literature has been dominated by arguments over the desirability of foreign law citations in the abstract, without sufficient attention to how the Court actually has used foreign law. To ground the normative debate, this article presents analysis of a newly created database containing cases from the Court’s earliest period to the present day in which the lead opinions relied on foreign law in deciding constitutional rights cases. The article uses this analysis to (1) make sense of why the recent trio of decisions was so controversial, even though the practice of citing foreign law was not new, and (2) show why many of the justifications offered by scholars for judicial reliance on foreign law bear no relation to how the Court has employed foreign law in practice.

In the period July–December 2012 both the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU) and the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR) delivered a number of important rulings that are worth reporting. The present overview discusses four CJEU judgments, two dealing with the rules determining the applicable legislation (Partena ASBL v Les Tartes de Chaumont-Gistoux SA and Format) and two involving benefits aimed at promoting access to employment (Caves Krier and Prete). In addition, the overview covers the notable ECtHR decision judgment in Ramaer and van Willigen v. the Netherlands, which seems to mark the end of a long legal battle that Dutch pensionado's have fought against the introduction of compulsory health insurance in 2006.

Agenda-setting theory is central to understanding the connection between media and American government. Indeed, legislative and executive branches of American government are often characterized by their publicity-seeking behavior. This is not true of the judicial branch. However, the importance of media coverage is magnified for the United States Supreme Court because, lacking the public affairs mechanisms of the other two branches, the Court is dependent on media dissemination of information about its decisions. Despite this important role, little is known about what attracts media to cover Supreme Court cases. We ask what case characteristics attract media attention. We examine the effect of case variables on general media coverage of Court decisions (a concept we call “newsworthiness,” measured by whether mention of a given case decision appears on the front page of the New York Times) and on inclusion of a case on a list of legally significant cases over time (a concept we call “legal salience,” measu...

Abstract The International Court of Justice (the Court) can formulate appropriate orders whilst being sufficiently attune to the domestic constraints confronted by States. In the Consular Notification cases, the United States was ordered, ‘by means of its own choosing’, to undertake a ‘review and reconsideration’ of the convictions and sentences of certain named individuals whose rights to consular notification were denied. The Court revived a distinction between obligations of conduct and obligations of result but refrained from indicating when a violation of an international obligation occurred, in this case, potential non-compliance with its earlier judgment in Avena. This article argues that the Court need not attempt to remodel the doctrine of State responsibility in order to provide an adequate and effective remedy. Juridical restitution, as evidenced in its prior jurisprudence, contemplates intrusion into the municipal legal order of States. This article also considers the free choice of means principle and the appropriate judicial function in these circumstances. It concludes that the remedial orders declared by the Court can be made by reference to the particular obligation at issue and the circumstances of each case. Furthermore, the litigation context and the claims made by the disputants cannot be overlooked by the Court when determining the degree of specificity required by those orders.