The California judiciary is one of three branches of the state government. This paper provides an overview of the current court system, its historical development, its relationship with the other branches of state government and the federal courts, and a comparison of California's judiciary with other states' judicial systems.
The digital era invoked new challenges to judicial systems. The Internet enabled violation of privacy and intellectual property rights and enhanced the magnitude of criminal activity. Recognizing the inability of courts to handle a high magnitude of lawsuits, along with enforcement difficulties, policymakers worldwide chose to delegate quasi-judicial powers to online intermediaries that facilitate or enable such potential violations or infringements of rights. Search engines were first tasked to perform a quasi-judicial role under a notice-and-takedown regime to combat copyright infringement around the world. Recently, the European Union (EU) decided to delegate judicial authority to search engines by granting rights of erasure, or delisting of personal data, about EU individuals under certain circumstances. Effectively, the EU placed search engines—mainly Google currently—as a judiciary, tasked to balance different fundamental human rights. This privatization of the judiciary represents a new paradigm in legal systems and possesses vast global ramifications, which must be further scrutinized. This Article provides such scrutiny. It begins by briefly exploring the rights to be forgotten and delisted. It then provides an overview of the quasi-judicial roles played by search engines prior to the new EU rights regime and compares them to their new judicial role. Following an examination of the pragmatic and normative difficulties in the implementation of the EU rights regime, this Article evaluates and discusses the future of the private judiciary. It examines the drawbacks and benefits of judicial privatization; explores whether other means of regulation are more appropriate; and proposes modest solutions to properly address the shortcomings of the new privatized judiciary. This Article warns against such form of privatization and its current implementation, especially when fundamental rights are at stake. If policymakers insist on adjudicating search engines, they must also restrain their judicial power and ...
This note considers the performance of the South African courts in deciding environmental cases and suggests that, notwithstanding some good decisions, there are still too many decisions where the courts are not applying relevant legislative provisions or misinterpreting the law. It is suggested that the future acceptable performance of the courts not only rests on correct interpretation and application of the legislation, but also increased familiarity by judges with the technical environmental context within which the cases are situated. The role of legal practitioners in achieving this is also highlighted.
The essay takes up and discusses the different meanings of the term democracy, analyzes the concept of "interpretance" and reflects on the political neutrality of the judiciary. The introduction of external requirements transforms the way of looking at the Constitution, implying a shift from the Constituent Power to the Constituent Power. The conclusion is that democracy seems to seek its legitimacy no longer through the political constitution and its guardians, but through the potential communicative means that are grouped around society's different means of communication.
An ombudsman institution is one of the most rapidly developing institutions in modern democratic states. Ombudsmen can be characterised as individual and impartial investigators of administration and its conduct. They act as dispute resolution mechanisms between the state and individuals and sometimes also as solvers of problems of individuals. In order to assess the quality of administrative conduct they use normative standards against which they assess this conduct. However, all these matters are primarily in the hands of the judiciary. The judiciary, notably administrative courts are the most important dispute resolution mechanisms in modern states that assess the administrative conduct against certain normative standards. Thus ombudsmen and the judiciary can be often seen as institutions having relatively similar competences in a relatively similar area, despite retaining numerous differences. They both are approached by the individuals and they can express their opinions about administrative justice. This paper highlights the main findings and recommendations of a comparative legal research carried out in the area of mutual interrelations of ombudsmen and the judiciary. On the examples of three different legal systems (the Netherlands, England and the European Union) the research discusses the possibility of coordination of relations between the ombudsman and the judiciary in connection with the position of these institutions, with their jurisprudence and ombudsprudence and with normative standards they use in their work.
"In the legislature of the state of Alabama, Regular Session 1915, .Containing report of Special Judiciary Commmittee of the Legislature, with a minority report; also House Bills 781 to 849, and resolutions by said committee." -- at head of title. ; Caption title. ; Mode of access: Internet.
The article is devoted to the constitutional foundations of judiciary in Ukraine. According to article 6 of the Constitution of Ukraine, state power in Ukraine is divided into three main branches – legislative, еxecutive and justice. For each of these branches there is a corresponding system of foundations and principles that determine their essence and specific features of organization and functioning of the mechanism of the state. They play a key role for the judiciary in Ukraine. Appropriate due to the main objective of the national judiciary – a provision of the capacity for each person to exercise their right to a fair trial,based on the rule of law. Considering the issues, it is first necessary to pay attention to the essence of the concepts "foundations" and "principle" as constitutional categories. It should be noted, that these concepts have the same meaning for the expression of fundamental ideas and leadership directions of the organization and functioning of all basic constitutional legal institutions in Ukraine. The concept of the constitutional foundations of justice in Ukraine, given the position on the advisability of securing the appropriate category in the position of art.129 of the Constitution of Ukraine, which is a basic norm in the system of foundations and principles of the judicial branch of power and its legal effect on the reflection, is refined in laws and procedural codes. Now the issue of the constitutional foundations of justice in Ukraine and their impact on the judiciary is considered in a significant amount of research in the field of science of constitutional law of Ukraine. The corresponding trend and the relevance of the question of the constitutional principles of justice are due to the constant development of constitutionalism and the process of reform of the judiciary in Ukraine. However, it must be concluded, that the constitutional foundations of judiciary, which are presented in art.129 of the Constitution of Ukraine is the basis of the foundations and principles of ...
Judicial independence is an intrinsic element of constitutional democracy and the rule of law. Thus, constitutionalism and separation of powers can only function properly under the atmosphere of constitutionally guaranteed judicial independence. This paper highlights how the executive exploits its role in the tripod of separation of powers to interfere in the independence of the judiciary in Nigeria. It found that executive lawlessness, corruption, lack of provision for judiciary capital expenditure in the Constitution, abuse of powers in the judicial officers' removal and appointment of judicial officers on political loyalty are some of the inroads. Thus, it is recommended that there is an urgent need to further amend the CFRN 1999 (as amended) to give effect to the financial autonomy of the judiciary by providing for capital expenditure of the judiciary and that in the appointment process of judicial officers, the powers of the President or Governor to appoint a judicial officer should be removed and vested in the National Judicial Council.
For decades, the justices themselves undermined the honor which ought to be afforded the third branch of the federal government as they regularly exceeded the proper, limited but vitally important role they ought to play. October term after October term, the justices acted as a permanent constitutional convention, disrupting legislative accommodations and settled precedent with regularity.
Access to impartial and effective courts is the cornerstone of democratic civil society. When the intention of political actors is to extinguish democratic civil society, they often wear away at the autonomy of the judiciary. International law and the constitutions of many states throughout the world guarantee access to autonomous courts. Despite having such guarantees in place, the government of the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela has consistently attacked the judiciary in order to erode its autonomy and bring it under political control. Strategies used to achieve that goal include purging judges, intimidating them, and preventing judges from getting tenure. As a result, today there are two parallel Venezuelan judiciaries competing for authority while citing to the same constitution. This article will present evidence regarding the methods through which the autonomy of Venezuela's courts was intentionally destroyed by the Chavista government. It will begin by looking at the history of the judicial power created by the constitution of 1999, analyze the specific acts that led to the politicization of the courts, and explore the effects of that politicization on Venezuelan constitutional government.
This text to be published in a handbook of political science offers a political sociology of the judiciary. ; Ce texte à paraître dans un Manuel de science politique propose une sociologie politique du pouvoir judiciaire.