Suchergebnisse

Many judicial scholars argue that judicial dissent stems from partisanship or political differences among judges on courts. These arguments are evaluated using the variation in political backgrounds on a constitutional court, Chile's Constitutional Tribunal, using case-level and vote-level data from 1990 until 2010. The analysis shows that the rate of dissent rises after major reforms to the powers and judicial selection mechanism of the Tribunal in 2005 and that the dissent rate corresponds to periods of greater partisanship on the court. Further, decisions regarding the unconstitutionality of laws intensify the propensity to dissent at both the case and judge level. In further examination of variation across judges' voting records, judges who have identifiable partisan associations of any kind are generally more likely to dissent than those with limited political backgrounds.

From 1997 to 2001, the Chilean government enacted laws to transform its criminal justice system from one using a closed and secretive inquisitorial-type process to one employing a more open and transparent adversarial process. These criminal procedure reforms significantly changed the roles of lower court judges, prosecutors and public defenders and provided defendants and victims with broader individual rights. Despite its commitment to criminal law reforms, during the implementation period of these reforms, the government remained lackluster in its commitment to a more open and transparent justice system when it related to more politicized cases. During the criminal law reform implementation process, the government was hesitant to prosecute high-level Pinochet-era officials while adamant about prosecuting individuals who criticized the judiciary. Not until the government had significantly improved the lower level criminal procedures was there a change in the way that the government dealt with the prosecution of high-level officials under the Pinochet regime and with individuals criticizing the judiciary itself. This paper explores the connection between the government's commitment to lower level criminal law reforms and its policy switch in dealing with more politicized cases.