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AbstractInternational courts have far-from-perfect records of compliance. States routinely delay the implementation of policy changes necessary to come into line with international obligations. Some judicial orders are simply ignored in their entirety. Yet judicial orders aimed at potentially recalcitrant states often vaguely express what is required and thus create conditions for delay and defiance. This article leverages a detailed public monitoring system for decisions of the Inter-American Court of Human Rights to evaluate a model of judicial opinion writing that connects the informational challenges associated with effectuating significant policy change to the language that judges adopt in their orders and, ultimately, to the reactions of states. Our results suggest that uncertainty about how precisely to bring about a policy change influences compliance by reducing the clarity of judicial orders. Flexibility in language permits judges to tradeoff maximal pressure for compliance for the ability to leverage local knowledge about how to bring a state in line with its international obligations. From this perspective, noncompliant outcomes are not necessarily a clear signal of weak judicial institutions, but, instead, they are a natural piece of the process by which judges manage difficult policy-making tasks.

Constitutions empower people to ask judges for binding orders directing state agents to remedy rights violations, but state agents do not always comply. Scholars propose that by making it easier to observe noncompliance, courts can leverage public pressure for compliance when it exists. Yet, exposure to information about noncompliance might lead individuals to accept high levels of noncompliance and reduce support for judicial remedies. We estimate the rate of noncompliance with judges' orders via a rigorous tracking study of the Colombiantutela.We then embed this rate in three survey experiments fielded with online national quota samples. We show that people find the noncompliance rate in thetutelahighly unacceptable regardless of a variety of mitigating factors. We also show that public reactions to this information depend on prior expectations, a finding that stresses the importance of scholarship in cognitive psychology for studies of compliance in law and politics.

Do the processes states use to select judges for peak courts influence gender diversity? Scholars have debated whether concentrating appointment power in a single individual or diffusing appointment power across many individuals best promotes gender diversification. Others have claimed that the precise structure of the process matters less than fundamental changes in the process. We clarify these theoretical mechanisms, derive testable implications concerning the appointment of the first woman to a state's highest court, and then develop a matched-pair research design within a Rosenbaum permutation approach to observational studies. Using a global sample beginning in 1970, we find that constitutional change to the judicial selection process decreases the time until the appointment of the first woman justice. These results reflect claims that point to institutional disruptions as critical drivers of gender diversity on important political posts.