Document Type
Article
Publication Title
University of Chicago Legal Forum
Publication Date
Summer 2016
ISSN
0041-9494
Page Number
1683
Keywords
judicial reputation, policy preference, reputation
Disciplines
Courts | Judges | Law
Abstract
Professors Garoupa and Ginsburg begin their book with an unusually valuable introduction to the substantive chapters which follow. The introduction is framed by two (in)famous examples of judicial action: one that strengthened a court’s reputation and one that damaged a court’s reputation. The book opens with Chief Justice John Roberts’s 2012 Obamacare decision (pp 1–2). Roberts not only joined the five-justice majority that upheld the constitutionality of the Affordable Care Act (Obamacare), but also authored the Supreme Court’s opinion. Roberts’s policy preference, by any conventional measure, should have been to overturn Obamacare (p 1). Thus, he must have chosen to vote against his preferred outcome in the immediate case in order to achieve other goals. Roberts’s actions appear to have strengthened the view of the Court as independent and of himself as a statesman chief in the model of Chief Justice John Marshall.
Garoupa and Ginsburg draw a sharp and deliberate contrast with the sensational Italian murder trial of American exchange student Amanda Knox for the killing of her roommate (p 5). The Italian judiciary drew unwanted negative attention with its inconsistent rulings involving multiple courts, multiple trials, multiple findings of guilt, and ultimately a declaration of Knox’s innocence by the country’s highest court (p 5). The fallout from this incident and Italy’s woeful position on a World Bank ranking and other rankings of judicial quality (it fares worse than Haiti on at least one measure) has included calls for serious reforms to the Italian judicial system. Writing elsewhere, the authors warn that “[a] judiciary with a poor reputation . . . will find itself starved of both resources and respect”. The authors demonstrate that, even in two different countries, two dramatically different kinds of cases, and two starkly different court structures, judicial reputation matters. But how does it matter?
Recommended Citation
Tracey E. George and G. Mitu Gulati,
Courts of Good and Ill Repute: Garoupa and Ginburg's Judicial Reputation: A Comparative Theory, 83 University of Chicago Legal Forum. 1683
(2016)
Available at: https://scholarship.law.vanderbilt.edu/faculty-publications/1622
