IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/wpa/wuwple/0512002.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

The Case for Managed Judges: Learning from Japan after the Political Upheaval of 1993

Author

Listed:
  • J. Mark Ramseyer

    (Harvard Law School)

Abstract

Although the executive branch appoints Japanese Supreme Court justices as it does in the United States, a personnel office under the control of the Supreme Court rotates lower court Japanese judges through a variety of posts. This creates the possibility that politicians might indirectly use the postings to reward or punish judges. For forty years, the Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) controlled the legislature and appointed the Supreme Court justices who in turn controlled the careers of these lower-court judges. In 1993, it temporarily lost control. We use regression analysis to examine whether the end of the LDP’s electoral lock changed the court’s promotion system, and find surprisingly little change. Whether before or after 1993, the Supreme Court used the personnel office to 'manage' the careers of lower court judges. The result: uniform and predictable judgments that economize on litigation costs by facilitating out-of-court settlements.

Suggested Citation

  • J. Mark Ramseyer, 2005. "The Case for Managed Judges: Learning from Japan after the Political Upheaval of 1993," Law and Economics 0512002, University Library of Munich, Germany.
  • Handle: RePEc:wpa:wuwple:0512002
    Note: Type of Document - pdf
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://econwpa.ub.uni-muenchen.de/econ-wp/le/papers/0512/0512002.pdf
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    Other versions of this item:

    More about this item

    Keywords

    judges; Japan; supreme court; political economy;
    All these keywords.

    JEL classification:

    • K - Law and Economics

    NEP fields

    This paper has been announced in the following NEP Reports:

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:wpa:wuwple:0512002. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: EconWPA (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://econwpa.ub.uni-muenchen.de .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.