Does Judicial Independence Matter for Judicial Influence?

THIS SEMINAR WAS ORIGINALLY SCHEDULED ON MARCH 12TH, BUT HAS BEEN RESCHEDULED TO THIS NEW DATE, MAY 7TH.
Speaker:  Clifford Carrubba, Emory University
Under what conditions is judicial independence from national governments necessary for judicial influence over national government action?  Some scholar argue that informal and sub constitutional factors matter more than "parchment protections", while others believe judicial independence is critical for judicial influence. Building off of a basic separation of powers argument, we demonstrate that formal institutional protections designed to ensure judicial independence should be critical only when elected officials are sufficiently unified, where "sufficiently unified" depends upon the design of the political system. That is, they are more than "parchment barriers" and less than necessary. To test the argument, we introduce a new cross-national database on high court constitutional review (CompLaw). The Complaw database is designed to systematically and consistently code data on high court constitutional decisions at a very fine-grained level across a large variety of political systems.
This talk is part of The Europe Center's "European Governance Seminar Series."
Clifford J. Carrubba, B.A. (1991), Duke University; Ph.D (1998), Stanford University. Previous appointment at SUNY Stony Brook (Assistant Professor). Specialization: comparative legislative and judicial politics, comparative institutions, European politics, game theory. Current research projects include studies of legislative behavior and roll call vote analysis, the design and change of judicial institutions (with application to the European Court of Justice), and statistical tests of game theoretic models.
Carrubba is currently serving as the Director of The Institute for Quantitative Theory and Methods, developed and launched by Dr. Carrubba in December of 2011.