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This paper presents an empirical study of wartime effects on the Appellate Committee of the House of Lords over the last half century. Building on patterns observed on U.S. American appellate courts, I argue that British Law Lords may vote more conservatively and may become more deferential to the elected branches when war concerns are salient. Looking at the universe of cases decided between 1945 and 2008, the findings suggest shifts both in outcomes involving the government as well as in civil liberties cases that do not involve the government. The House of Lords is more likely to vote conservative in civil rights and liberties cases during intense war. Instead of becoming more deferential, though, the findings suggest that the government is more likely to lose in the Appellate Committee during intense war. The effect, however, is conditioned on low approval ratings of the government. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

How does a country's participation in a war change judicial behavior? This paper looks at U.S. Supreme Court and U.K. House of Lords decision making in the past 60 years. The empirical analysis and interviews with legal elites in both countries suggest that war effects are not idiosyncratic to the U.S. Furthermore, war impacts both the balance between rights and security as well as the degree of deference shown to the executive by the high courts in both countries, though the mechanisms may not be as straight forward as previously thought. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

To what extent does the country's involvement in a war affect the degree of congressional deference to the executive? The "Two-Presidencies" theory advanced by Wildavsky (1966) posits that foreign policy issues enjoy greater presidential discretion than others due to their supranational and often time-pressing nature. At the same time, Clark (2006) argues that these characteristics are present not only in foreign policy issues, but in all issues during a nation's involvement in a war, suggesting increased presidential success in achieving his preferred policy position. We propose to bridge the "Two-Presidencies" debate and Clark's (2006) analysis of Courts of Appeals deference to executive interest in times of war by proposing to analyze the effect of war on congressional voting behavior as it relates to the executive position. We will analyze roll call votes from 1936 to 2007 with votes in deference to (or congruence with) the presidential position as the dependent variable. Our variables of interest will be a measure of battle deaths (indicating not only presence, but also severity of conflict) and presidential approval as well as ideological distance between the President and Congress. The analysis will measure the effect of war on three different sets of issues. The first model will include all issues, whereas two models will look at the effect of war on civil rights issues and criminal issues on one hand and foreign policy and defense issues on the other. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

There is a growing theoretical debate within the literature concerning the extent to which lower court judges anticipate how their decisions might be reviewed by the Supreme Court on appeal. Beginning with Songer, Segal, and Cameron (1994), and relying primarily on a principal-agent framework, scholars have produced conflicting evidence on whether the institutional structure of the judiciary impacts the decision-making process of lower court judges. We argue that one of the reasons for the theoretical disagreement is that previous analyses do not directly test whether lower court judges engage in strategic behavior. Our paper engages this discussion through the empirical test of a formal model depicting the relationship between the Courts of Appeals and the Supreme Court in a variety of issue areas. Using a dataset of appellate cases (from 1953 to 2002) that have been reviewed by the Supreme Court, plus a random sample of appellate cases that were not reviewed, we argue that the current literature on judicial hierarchies is limited because scholars have not modeled specifically the potential strategic interdependence between court levels. Our analysis borrows a statistical model from the IR literature on strategic anticipation and adapts it to the judicial hierarchy to demonstrate the impact of potential Supreme Court responses on the decision calculus of appellate judges. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

How is the checks and balance system in the United States affected by the presence of war? I propose to contribute to this question by analyzing changes in US Supreme Court decision making during times of war. Of particular interest will be the “two presidencies” concept proposed by Wildavsky (1969), suggesting that courts and congress pay increased deference to the executive in cases involving foreign policy. Later analysis has contributed to explain under which conditions this deference is observed, however, with the exception of Clark (2006), there has been no distinction between times of war and peace. The proposed analysis will therefore build upon the findings of the “two presidencies” debate (see also Ducat and Dudley 1989) and the relatively young field of judicial decision making during wartime (Epstein et al 2005). Looking at the universe of cases decided by the US Supreme Court from 1946-2007 and controlling for judicial ideology, the relationship between presidential approval and severity of conflict on the directionality of decisions in cases dealing with foreign policy issues and those that do not will be tested empirically. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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 paper assesses the influence of such factors on changes in the presence of rights litigation in the dockets of the High Courts of four established democracies with Common Law systems: Australia, Britain, Canada and the U.S. To this purpose, we perform time series analyses on data from the High Courts Judicial Database (Haynie et. al. 2007), and the Spaeth U.S. Supreme Court Database; along with data from secondary qualitative sources. Our analysis shows that increasing support structures do not account for the full picture, while other covariates -institutional changes and the court's ideological proclivity to take cases involving individual rights - can play a significant and decisive role in certain settings. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Epp's 'Rights Revolution' theory provides a compelling appraisal of the rise of rights protection in national policy making. He argues that the expansion of rights litigation in the agendas of high courts in four countries -the U.S., England, Canada and India-, results chiefly from the existence of a support structure in society to bring the cases to court, to finance the costs of litigation, and to encourage popular support for an expansion of rights. In this paper we seek to expand Epp's analysis by filling the gap produced by his methodological shortcomings and introducing Australia, Philippines and Mexico into the analysis. The preliminary results discussed in this paper show that one's conclusions about the existence and extent of a rights revolution in these countries can be sensitive to slight data and methodological issues. Further consideration of England and India reflects a picture of rights protection that differs from Epp's in significant respects. Moreover, a look at Australia, The Philippines and Mexico cast doubt on the leverage provided by the rights-support structure hypothesis. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]