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The use of experts in the review of tax cases is recognized globally. Nigeria appears to appreciate the importance of this practice. However, several previous attempts to establish tax courts or tribunals have been frustrated due to a lack of constitutional support. In the search for a better model for Nigeria, this article examines the US and Canadian experiences of using specialized tax courts or tribunals to see what lessons Nigeria could learn. The two north American experiments justify the use of tax courts as better alternatives to what Nigeria currently has. In particular, the Canadian experience appears to be more suited to the Nigerian context. Therefore, it is argued that Nigeria's 1999 Constitution should be amended to establish a Tax Court of Nigeria, which should be recognized as a superior court of record.

How does the Supreme Court choose among cases to grant cert? In the context of a model that considers a strategic Supreme Court, a continuum of rule-following lower courts, a set of cases available for revision, and a distribution of future lower court cases, we show that the Court grants cert to the case that will most significantly shape future lower court case outcomes in the direction that the Court prefers. That is, the Court grants cert to the case with maximum salience. If the Court is rather liberal (conservative) then the most salient case is the one that moves the discretionary range of the legal standard as far left (right) as possible. But if the Court is moderate, then the most salient case will be a function of the skewedness of the distribution of ideologies of the lower courts and the likelihood that future cases will fall within the part of the discretionary range that is adjusted if the case is granted cert. Variations take place when the ideology of the Court is moderately liberal, moderately conservative or fully moderate. Extensions of the model allow us to identify the sensitivity of the results to the number of petitions for revision; the variety of legal topics covered by the petitions; and anticipation of whether the Court will confirm or reverse.

“The court and the public” argues that a judge’s awareness of public opinion is not only inevitable, but also necessary. Can the Court also influence the public? The long tenures of the justices do not seem to affect the equilibrium in which the Court and the public exist. Public polls show some approval for the Supreme Court in general, rather than its specific actions. However, famously contentious cases such as Roe v. Wade reveal the intersection of public opinion and Court judgment, showing what happens when the Court feels its legitimacy is threatened. Has the Court aligned itself with public opinion over time?

A very small percentage of cases reach the Supreme Court. “The Court at Work” explains that even if a case meets all the criteria, the justices are still at liberty to refuse it. The Court has navigated debates about the separation of powers and conflicting approaches to interpretations of the statutes. The growth of the administrative state means that the Court is now more often tasked with determining whether administrative agencies are carrying out their duties correctly. What do cases and controversies mean to the Supreme Court? Why are these terms important, and how have the Court’s interpretations of them changed over time?

This Article is the first to examine the behavior of judges and their law clerks (officially entitled référendaires) at the Court of Justice of the European Union. It identifies a number of serious issues affecting Court performance. First, the Article finds that the Court's high judicial salaries and lack of procedural safe-guards for EU judicial appointments attract political appointees. As a consequence, some judges who are selected are not compe-tent to perform their duties and are dominated by their référen-daires. Moreover, the high turnover rate of EU judges hampers their productivity and increases their dependence on the référen-daires. Using a sample of data hand-collected from LinkedIn, the Article demonstrates that référendaires are drawn from a rela-tively closed social network. There is no open platform for re-cruiting référendaires, and the requirement of French as the working language significantly limits the pool of eligible candi-dates. The inefficiency of the référendaire labor market results in less competition, leading many référendaires to stay longer at the Court. The revolving door between the Court and the European Commission raises serious conflict issues, as the Commission is able to exert influence on the Court from the inside and gain a comparative advantage in litigation. In addition, the Court’s practice of issuing a single, collegial decision encourages free-riding, increases pressures for judges and référendaires to con-form, and suppresses dissent, as illustrated in the Microsoft case. Last but not least, the division of labor between the General Court and the Court of Justice could lead to divergent incentives for judges working at different levels of the Court.

Qualified and independent judges are essential for the legitimacy of the Courts. African regional courts will only contribute to the rule of law if the courts are legitimately composed. The purpose of this article is to consider whether judicial independence at the African regional and subregional courts has contributed t setting standards for the rule of law in Africa. The focus will be on the African Court of Human and People's Rights as well as the courts of the most prominent subregional communities. Because of the influence of the African Commission the composition of this body will also be considered.

Since 2013 judicial reforms in China have intensified. While recent studies of the Chinese judiciary have focused on structural reforms concerning the jurisdiction of courts and internal court management, it has largely gone unnoticed that the Supreme People’s Court (SPC) has established an open-access database archiving the decisions of every court in China. On the basis of legal documents, secondary literature and interviews with experts, this study investigates the implications of the new database. We find that the database establishes new channels of communication that affect the relationship between the courts and the public, and the position of judges within the judiciary. Further, the open-access database facilitates changes in the structure of communication among legal experts, which in turn promotes legal professionalism. We argue that the SPC made use of the party policy on the direct accountability of the courts towards the people in order to pursue its institutional interest in a professional judiciary.

This Constitutional Court case involved an application by Dengetenge Holdings (Pty) (Ltd) (a junior mining company) for leave to appeal against a decision of the Gauteng North High Court setting aside the award of a prospecting right to Dengetenge, and the decision of the Supreme Court of Appeal (SCA) refusing to condone the company's late filing of its heads of argument in its appeal against the High Court's decision.

The article examines how states talk about the International Criminal Court (ICC, or the Court) through the lens of Albert Hirschman’s exit, voice and loyalty framework. Based on a content analysis...

This article explores how Russians think about their courts and whether court veterans are distinguishable from those who have never used the courts. The analysis is based on data generated by a nationally representative survey fielded in 2010. The analysis clearly shows that users and nonusers think differently about courts and law. Users are both more positive and more negative about the courts, depending on the context. Although they praise the work of judges and other courthouse personnel in their own cases, they seem to emerge with lingering negative views of the courts that come into focus when asked more general questions. Nonusers tend to be more optimistic about the potential of courts to achieve justice.

This article examines how judicial selection, appointment and renewal processes deeply constrain and influence the decision-making processes at the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU). The short tenure period combined with the permanent triennial renewal of sitting judges are a source of instability at the CJEU and the discretion left to Member States for renewal is a concern for judicial independence. Besides, even if Member States were to concur on the core requirements of judicial merit, they may disagree on what judicial merit means in the context of the CJEU. Against this institutional background, collegiality, as a constitutive value, is a safeguard of independence as much as it facilitates the development of a common discourse within which individual decisions will be made. In this context, the development of legal principles is no worse than can reasonably be expected; the judges display considerable independence within the constraints placed upon the CJEU. However, some judgments may appear to be compromises; more radical reform is needed for those who hanker for clearer and bolder decisions. More ambitious judicial reforms can only succeed with a single, non-renewable term of office, without any triennial renewal of CJEU membership.

An important ‘stress test’ for regional human rights courts would be to see how well such courts perform when faced with authoritarian, human rights-violating regimes that they are supposed to hinder or constrain. These states are not only subjects of the court, but also its masters insofar as they enjoy various forms of control and accountability mechanisms that may constrain the court’s independence. The article argues that, at least in the case of the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR), its precarious ‘constrained independence’ should be modified to enhance its impact even under such circumstances. Such changes could strengthen the ECtHR’s impartial and independent role without running the risk of turning it into a so-called ‘juristocracy’ - subjecting European states to the arbitrary rule of international judges.

One of the main criticisms of the Criminal Division of the Court of Appeal has been that it is deficient at identifying and correcting the wrongful convictions of the factually innocent. These criticisms stem from the court’s perceived difficulties in relation to appeals based on factual error. The main ground of appeal for errors of fact is fresh evidence, and these appeals are particularly problematic because they require the court to trespass on the role of the jury somewhat in assessing new evidence on appeal against the evidence at trial in order to determine whether the conviction is unsafe. The broad consensus is that the court’s difficulties are caused by three main issues: its deference to the jury verdict; its reverence for the principle of finality; and a lack of resources to deal with huge numbers appealing. There is less agreement in identifying the source of the problems because it is not clear whether they derive from legislative powers or the interpretation of those powers by the judiciary. This article uses both qualitative and quantitative empirical research in order to try to determine what the court’s approach is in fresh evidence appeals and, if there are problems, whether it is the law or the interpretation of the law by the judiciary which is to blame. It also proposes reforms designed to make it easier for the court to rectify miscarriages of justice.

InShergill & Others v. Khaira & Others[2014] UKSC 33, the UK courts considered whether a Sikh holy saint had the power to dismiss trustees who questioned his “succession” to the religious institution of theNirmal Kutia Johal. The Supreme Court, reversing the decision of the Court of Appeal that religious questions were “nonjusticiable,” reinstated the judgment at first instance of the High Court to the contrary. The decision of the Supreme Court is important because whenever questions of the identification and legitimacy of successors to a religious institution have arisen, their “justiciability” before a secular court has invariably been a bone of contention on grounds that it threatens the autonomy of religious institutions. InShergillthe Supreme Court got around these concerns by drawing a normative distinction between the public law of the land (which the courts are required to determine), and the internal private law of a religious institution on matters of succession, ordination, and removal (which are not in themselves for the courts to decide). ButShergillalso went further than previous case law in two respects. First, the fundamental tenets of a belief system are capable of an objective assessment by a secular court provided that there is public law element to a dispute, in which case the court can then decide on the fitness of the successor for office. This means there is no general presumption that a secular court is barred from considering religious questions per se. Second, these principles apply just as much to the judicial consideration of non-Christian faiths as they to the Christian religion, and this is so notwithstanding the court's unfamiliarity with other faiths.

Pesticede decision - Env NGO - COM decision T-192/12 – Pesticide Action Network Europe / European Commission Subject GC - dismissed as Implementing Act - is not AA

This article reviews the need to provide greater human rights protections through Indonesia’s Human Rights Court mechanism. Despite the Court gaining momentum with the emergence of greater democratic freedoms, there is still quite a long way to go before the Court can function in a transparent and accountable way. The opportunity to do this was missed when political interests were put ahead of human rights protections when the legislation creating the Court paid no attention to the investigating and procedural complexities of categories of the crimes falling within the jurisdiction of the Court. Moreover, the lack of protection for victims and witnesses has had an adverse impact on prosecutions. This article recommends that some legislative reform is desirable but legislative reform alone will not bring about the equally important cultural change required to achieve this objective. This transformation can only be achieved by ensuring that all the relevant actors operating within the system are held accountable and required to operate in a professional manner.

The contaminated water supply in Flint, Michigan, highlighted lead issues in a relatively new context: drinking water. Lead-paint lawsuits, however, have filled court calendars for many years in many jurisdictions. This article examines a variety of recent lead-paint decisions issued by courts in New York—from trial level, to appellate, to the state's highest court, the New York Court of Appeals. As these cases suggest, lead-paint complaints against landlords and property owners are likely to continue to be filed in New York courts for quite some time to come.

I argue the Supreme Court learns to craft legal rules by relying on the Courts of Appeals as laboratories of law, observing their decisions and reviewing those that best inform legal development. I develop a model that shows how the Supreme Court leverages multiple Courts of Appeals decisions to identify which will be most informative to review, and what decision to make upon review. Because an unbiased judge only makes an extreme decision when there is an imbalance in the parties’ evidence, the Supreme Court is able to draw inferences from cases it chooses not to review. The results shed light on how hierarchy eases the inherent difficulty and uncertainty of crafting law and on how the Supreme Court learns to create doctrine.

The Czech Republic, as a signatory of the Convention on the Rights of the Child, has vested the practice of state administration in the field of care for minor children to the authorities of social and legal protection of children (OSPOD). The purpose of such legal establishment is to provide complex care for minor children on the lowest administrative instance (according to the Act on Social and Legal Protection of Children). Territorial jurisdiction of OSPODs is determined by Act No. 359/1999 Coll., on the Social and Legal Protection of Children, and is therefore established according to the official permanent residence of each child. The real decision-making regarding the protection of the rights of minors is the responsibility of municipal courts. These courts appoint OSPODs as “collision representatives” who protect the interests of minor children in court proceedings. However, the territorial jurisdiction of these courts is determined by Act No. 292/2013 Coll., on Special Court Proceedings. According to this latter act, the court that is eligible to carry out proceedings is the general court of the minor, and in fact it is typically the court where the minor resides. The real place of residence and the place of official permanent residence are not always identical. The aim of this paper is to assess the complex legislation on the issue in theory, and to point out the practical impact and possible problems derived from the different territorial jurisdiction of OSPODs and courts. Additionally, qualitative research has been carried out, based on structured interviews. The respondents are nine municipal court judges who specialize in family law, and nine leading employees of OSPODs. The respondents in both groups are selected in matching pairs, so that their responses reflect the mutual positional relation of the judges in the territory of the court and the local OSPODs. On the theoretical level, the research concerns the evaluation of judicial scholarly writings and court decisions in the field and defines and identifies the problems derived from the different territorial jurisdiction of the bodies. In the interviews, all respondents said that they found the different jurisdictions highly problematic. The wider impact of the issue has also been assessed in terms of guaranteeing the participation of collision representatives in the decision making of courts regarding minor children.

McGuire et al. (2009) set out to develop a better measure of the policy content of the U.S. Supreme Court's decisions. They justify their measure using a formal model, which they test empirically. ...

In many judgments, the European Court of Human Rights (Court) lists relevant international materials and sometimes uses these documents when determining whether the European Convention on Human Rights has been violated. These materials are often standard-setting documents that originate in the Council of Europe, the Court’s organisational framework. This article analyses the Court’s practice of using such documents, based on a sample of 795 judgments. The analysis serves to provide an answer to the questions of how and why the Court refers to and relies on these documents. More specifically, the article describes the number of judgments and the importance of the judgments in which the Court cites a CoE document, as well as the type of organs and the different documents cited. The analysis continues with a description of the part of the Court’s judgments in which its determination of the question of compliance with the standards in the CoE documents appears and also considers the purposes for which the Court seems to use the materials. Lastly, insight is provided into the relevance of the CoE documents to the Court’s reasoning and explanations are given as to why the Court does (not) follow the standards formulated in a document.

The United States Supreme Court has significant influence over the development of legal policy, yet it must rely on external actors to bring to fruition the desired effect of its decisions. Among the most important such actors are state high courts who are often motivated to issue decisions promoting policies at odds with the U.S. Supreme Court and who have mechanisms to legitimize such decisions. This study builds on existing work on state court compliance with U.S. Supreme Court precedent by introducing a new theoretical framework that accounts for the impact of state-specific precedent vitality, or the degree to which the high court of a specific state has positively treated a U.S. Supreme Court precedent, on state high court compliance. Our analysis of state high court treatment of Miller v. California provides strong evidence for the importance of state-specific vitality as a determinant of state high court compliance.

The South African adversarial system of civil procedure in the High Court owes its origin to that of England. As with all civil procedural systems, the South African system is not stagnant. Its primary sources, namely Acts of Parliament and rules of court, are constantly amended in an attempt to meet the changing needs of society. Court delay and costinefficient procedural mechanisms, however, contribute to public dismay. The High Court, in the exercise of its inherent power to regulate its process, do so with the purpose of enhancing access to justice. The advantage of the system lies in the fact that it is not cast in stone but could, subject to the Constitution of the Republic of South Africa, 1996, be developed to make it more accessible to the public whilst protecting the public’s fundamental rights entrenched in the Constitution and, in this regard, particularly the right to afair trial embedded in sec. 34 of the Constitution. This contribution gives an overview of the system with reference to the court structure, the judiciary, the process in the High Court and its underlying principles, appeals, class actions and alternative civil dispute resolution mechanisms.

The Constitutional Court does not only interpreting the Constitution in judicial review cases. The Courtalso applies legal construction which include constitutional construction and statutory construction. Thisarticle aims to identify this approach in the Court rulings. It also seeks to find conditions that trigger theCourt to venture on discovering the law by applying legal construction.

It is rare for a national court to be invited to recognise and enforce a judgment from an international or regional court, as opposed to a judgment from a foreign national court. This article examines a decision of the High Court of Ghana given in respect of an application to enforce a judgment of the ECOWAS Court of Justice. The article examines the bases of the Ghanaian court's decision not to enforce the ECOWAS judgment and suggests how future cases may be decided.

The issue is dedicated to training court interpreting issues. Nowadays court interpreting has become a necessity. It is a significant element in many court procedures. Court interpreting is of great current interest nowadays. The topicality of court interpreting is substantiated by the fact that a rather large number of court participants from many countries with different foreign languages are involved in the judicial process. Particular emphasis is laid on types of court interpreting. Much attention is drawn to documents translation issues. The proposed idea is to supply the interpreter with documents before initiating the translation process with the aim of reconsidering the contents in adequate time. When applying sight translation, an interpreter must have a good stock of vocabulary and knowledge of specific kind of submitted document. Significant weight is attached to analyzing the role of the court interpreter. Court interpreters should comply with strict requirements in the court process. Interpreting studies are commonly classified into two distinctive fields: conference interpreting and community interpreting. Whereas conference interpreting is performed in the form of monologue, community interpreting is carried out in the form of dialogue (normally two initial lecturers are involved in the interpretation process). In conference interpreting, the interpreters have their own pre-scheduled utterances which are often written from source material, whereas in community interpreting, the interpreters experience impetuous speeches which may be pre-scheduled. Thus, relevant training court interpreting may contribute a lot to the court process to be organized.

Contemporary Russian civil procedure is not a pure Continental model because it also has procedural features of the common law system, as well as some other original and exceptional features. This article examines the main aspects of Russian civil justice: its main principles; judicial organization, including the structure of the courts and the division between courts of general jurisdiction and arbitrazh (commercial) courts, and the Intellectual Property Court; sources of procedural law; bar organization; the jurisdiction of the courts; actions and proceedings; legal costs; evidence; administrative procedure; class actions; enforcement proceedings; and arbitration and mediation.

Bush v. Gore was a straightforward and legally correct decision. For more than a quarter century, the Supreme Court has treated the stuffing of ballot boxes as a paradigmatic violation of the Equal Protection Clause. Much more subtle and indirect forms of vote dilution have also been outlawed. Like some of those practices, the selective and partial recount ordered by the Florida Supreme Court may have been an inadvertent form of vote dilution. But that recount had effects that were virtually indistinguishable from those in the paradigmatic case. There is no meaningful difference between adding illegal votes to the count and selectively adding legal votes, which is what the Florida court was doing. The Supreme Court rightly concluded that the vote dilution in this case violated well-established equal protection principles. Nor did the Supreme Court err in its response to this constitutional violation. Although the Court acted with unprecedented dispatch after the Florida court's December 8, 2000 decision, it was highly improbable that a legally proper recount could be conducted by the December 18 deadline set by federal law. And it was quite impossible for such a recount to meet the December 12 deadline that the Florida court itself had found in Florida law. Contrary to a widespread misconception, the U.S. Supreme Court properly accepted the Florida court's interpretation of state law and provided that court with an opportunity to reconsider its own interpretation of state law. When the clock ran out, it was entirely due to mistakes and delays attributable to the Florida court. The Supreme Court's majority opinion has been subjected to a barrage of political criticisms of a kind that might more fittingly be directed against a Senate Majority Leader or a Secretary of State. Ironically, it is precisely because the Justices correctly applied the law that they have been accused of having partisan motives.

This chapter considers the actions commenced before the Court of Justice. These include actions by the European Commission and other member states against a member state (Articles 258–60 TFEU); judicial review of acts of the institutions (Article 263 TFEU); the action against the institutions for a failure to act (Article 265 TFEU); actions for damages (Articles 268 and 340 TFEU); and the right to plead the illegality of an EU regulation (Article 277 TFEU). The chapter also considers interim measures under Articles 278 and 279 TFEU and enforcement actions arising from the Commission enforcement of EU competition law against individuals.

The proposed international criminal section of the African Court of Justice and Human and Peoples Rights (the African Criminal Court) involves a number of progressive features. Among them is the Court’s authority to hear cases against corporations for a comprehensive list of international and transnational crimes. According to Article 46C of the African Criminal Court’s statute, entitled ‘Corporate Criminal Liability’, ‘the Court shall have jurisdiction over legal persons, with the exception of States.’ As no international criminal court has yet to exercise jurisdiction over corporations for international or transnational crimes, the African Criminal Court, should it come into operation, will necessarily tread new ground. This paper forensically examines the contours of Article 46C, with a view to elucidating its scope and to explore some of the challenges it raises.

The Federal Court of Australia performs a fundamentally important role within Australia’s democratic system. It has served as a site for the disputation, negotiation and resolution of issues fundamentally important to Australian society. It does so in the context of a constitutional system affirming the principle of separation of powers and the rule of law, as a means of preserving and enforcing the rights of individuals and navigating the boundaries of the powers of the state. In that context, its records, gathered both through the internal workings of the court and through the cases that come before it, contain a narrative shaping our contemporary understanding of the rights of the individual and the role of the state. Despite the importance of its records in that narrative, the preservation and access to the Federal Court’s records continues to be seen through the lens of traditional understandings of the management of litigation. This chapter explores the Federal Court’s role within the broader context of constructing our understanding of the roles and responsibilities of citizenship and illustrate the importance of the Court’s records as an archival resource. In doing so, it highlights the parallels and inconsistencies between traditional archival institutions and the Court in relation to selection, preservation and access to records.

The number of constitutional courts and supreme courts with constitutional review rights has strongly increased with the third wave of democratisation across the world as an important element of the new constitutionalism. These courts play an important role in day-to-day politics as they can nullify acts of parliament and thus prevent or reverse a change in the status quo. In macro-concepts of comparative politics, their role is unclear. Either they are integrated as counter-majoritarian institutional features of a political system or they are entirely ignored: some authors do not discuss their potential impact at all, while others dismiss them because they believe their preferences as veto players are entirely absorbed by other actors in the political system. However, we know little about the conditions and variables that determine them as being counter-majoritarian or veto players. This article employs the concept of Tsebelis’ veto player theory to analyse the question. It focuses on the spatial configuration of veto players in the legislative process and then adds the court as an additional player to find out if it is absorbed in the pareto-efficient set of the existing players or not. A court which is absorbed by other veto players should not in theory veto new legislation. It is argued in this article that courts are conditional veto players. Their veto is dependent on three variables: the ideological composition of the court; the pattern of government control; and the legislative procedures. To empirically support the analysis, data from the United States, France and Germany from 1974 to 2009 is used. This case selection increases variance with regard to system types and court types. The main finding is that courts are not always absorbed as veto players: during the period of analysis, absorption varies between 11 and 71 per cent in the three systems. Furthermore, the pattern of absorption is specific in each country due to government control, court majority and legislative procedure. Therefore, it can be concluded that they are conditional veto players. The findings have at least two implications. First, constitutional courts and supreme courts with judicial review rights should be systematically included in veto player analysis of political systems and not left aside. Any concept ignoring such courts may lead to invalid results, and any concept that counts such courts merely as an institutional feature may lead to distorted results that over- or under-estimate their impact. Second, the findings also have implications for the study of judicial politics. The main bulk of literature in this area is concerned with auto-limitation, the so-called ‘self-restraint’ of the government to avoid defeat at the court. This auto-limitation, however, should only occur if a court is not absorbed. However, vetoes observed when the court is absorbed might be explained by strategic behaviour among judges engaging in selective defection.

1. Last year, the Administrative Court published the Judicial Review Guide 2016 (“the Guide”). The Guide brings together the relevant statutory provisions, rules of procedure, practice directions a...

Between the 1970s and 1990s, political scientists in the United States pursued a distinctive research program that employed ethnographic methods to study micro politics in criminal courts. This article considers the relevance of this concept for court researchers today through a case study about bail decision making in a lower criminal court in Australia. It describes business as usual in how decisions are made and the provision of pretrial services. It also looks at how traditionalists and reformers understood business as usual, and uses this as a critical concept to make visible micro politics in this court. The case study raises issues about organizational change in criminal courts since the 1990s, since there are fewer studies about plea bargaining and more about specialist or problem-solving courts. It is suggested that we need a new international agenda that can address change and continuity in criminal courts.

This paper analyzes violation of the right to trial within a reasonable time in administrative proceedings. Attention is payed to administrative proceedings because the second-instance administrative authority, apart from a few limited exceptions, can remit a case to a lower instance for unlimited number of times. The issue has gained significance particularly after the adoption of the Law on Protection of the Right to Trial within a Reasonable Time which protects only parties in court proceedings. Relying on the practice of the European Court of Human Rights and Serbian Constitutional Court, this paper points to the possible ways of protection of the right to trial within a reasonable time in administrative proceedings, but also to the need to ban repeated remittals of a case for re-examination in appellate review.

The author comments on the decision of the Constitutional Court in the Case of G. R. and draws attention on the fact that although the allegations and claims of the applicant in this case are substantially similar to the assessments of the European Court of Human Rights in the Case of Zorica Jovanovic v. Serbia, the facts and circumstances established by the Constitutional Court in the constitutional appeal Case of G. R. are significantly different from the facts established by the European Court in the Case of Zorica Jovanovic v. Serbia. Therefore, the first and most important consequence of the Constitutional Court decision reviewed in this article is to learn that all so-called 'missing babies' cases - both before the domestic public authorities as well as before the European Court of Human Rights - are not the same. Contrary to the findings of facts by the European Court of Human Rights in the judgment Zorica Jovanovic v. Serbia (it is noted that the body of the applicant's son was never released to the applicant or her family, the cause of death was never determined, the applicant was never provided with an autopsy report or informed of when and where her son had allegedly been buried, and his death was never officially recorded) from the documentation that has been filed with the Constitutional Court follows that the constitutional complainant could not have had any doubts regarding the report on the death of his children or uncertainty about the 'crucial factual or legal issues' i.e. credible information as to what really happened to his children. The Constitutional Court also found that all the neatly guided medical protocols with data on the health status of twins, undertaken diagnostic and therapeutic procedures, anamnesis and discharge lists were delivered to the complainant. Unfortunately, despite all the efforts of doctors to save two premature infants, who were born with serious deficits in their basic functions, a fatal outcome was inevitable. The Constitutional Court also found that the facts of birth and death of both children were properly recorded in the Birth and Death Registers, that the parents did not respond to the call of the medical institution to bury their children, and that there is a credible evidence that funeral was carried out in the organization and at the expense of the Institute for neonatology, where children were treated and where a lethal outcome was performed. Therefore, the foregoing considerations were sufficient to enable the Constitutional Court to conclude that allegations of the complainant that he had no credible information about what happened to his children were unfounded in regard to allegations of violation of the right to respect for family life under Art. 8 of the European Convention on Human Rights.

The Supreme Court sometimes chooses to use its limited time to revisit earlier decisions. In doing so, the justices signal the importance of reasserting, correcting, or reconsidering their arguments. We find that the likelihood of the Supreme Court revisiting a case in a given year increases significantly as the number of circuit courts critical of that opinion increases. These results suggest that an acknowledgment of the important role of the circuit courts influences the decision to revisit cases. Even if the Court merely clarifies or reinforces earlier opinions, criticism in the circuits prompts the Court to take some action. Though the Supreme Court’s word is final, barring a constitutional amendment or legislative override in nonconstitutional cases, the mechanism of criticism in the circuits allows reconsideration of many issues already decided by the Court and sheds light on the importance of institutional structures to the maintenance of the rule of law.

The article considers the different options available to international tribunals, especially the International Court of Justice, when facing cases that raise scientific and technical issues. While international tribunals can sometimes leave it to the parties to seek an agreement on such issues or resort to legal reasoning to avoid making technical and scientific assessments, other methods may need to be adopted. The Court can rely on the expertise provided by the parties, informally consult “invisible” experts – as long as their views are not likely to affect the content of the decision – or proceed to the appointment of experts or assessors, the latter participating in the deliberations without the right to vote. Due process implies that the parties should be able to comment on the views expressed by Court-appointed experts. This requirement may create difficulties for the Court in reaching a decision on scientific or technical issues.

“Go to court? Or not to court?” Those are the questions, with apologies to the late great bard.