Article III requires federal judges who exercise federal jurisdiction to be given life tenure and undiminished compensation, limiting Congress’s ability to influence the judiciary. But from the ...beginning, we have accepted certain forms of adjudication outside Article III — state courts, most obviously, but also territorial courts, administrative adjudication of public rights, and military tribunals. The question is why.
This Article attempts to provide an answer. It argues that it is a mistake to focus on the act of adjudication itself; adversary presentation about the application of law to fact is simply a procedure, and not a procedure uniquely limited to Article III courts. Instead, the constitutional question is one of government power. What kind of power has the tribunal been vested with, and what is it trying to do with that power?
With this framework in view, the structure and scope of non–Article III adjudication becomes clearer. Some courts exercise the judicial power of some other government. This is why territorial courts and state courts are constitutional. Some bodies exercise executive power, subject to the constraints reflected by the Due Process Clause. This is why administrative adjudication of public rights and military trials are constitutional. Some exercise no governmental power and can proceed only as an adjunct to another entity or on the basis of consent. This is the only basis on which magistrate judges and bankruptcy judges can proceed and may render some of their current behavior unconstitutional.
Our main aim is to identify the key features of spatial disputes concerning decisions on building conditions that concluded with a court decision. Parties to such planning disputes, directions of ...court decisions and territorial regularities were all identified. Both the database of administrative rulings of the Supreme Administrative Court (391 judgments in 205 municipalities) and data on local spatial planning documents (2.5 million decisions in 2,477 municipalities in Poland) were used. The results show that the initiators of planning disputes concluded in court are mainly property owners and their neighbours. Courts are more likely to uphold an investor's complaint.
Street-level resolutions are reached when street-level bureaucrats resolve disputes between citizens and other state officials. However, little is known about the factors that influence the ...tendencies in such resolutions to accept the citizens' claims. Such knowledge is important for exposing street-level bureaucrats' state or citizen favouritism which can shift the public's perceptions of those serving at the front lines of governance. This study examines real-world street-level resolutions (administrative lower-court rulings) and finds that those made, jointly or alone, by deciders who are career members of mixed-teams that include non-career lay-official members, have a higher tendency to favour the citizen's claims.
This article, after a brief historical overview, recalls that the Italian Council of State carries out two main functions: judicial, through second instance judgements of administrative court's ...decisions; and advisory, on special appeals to the President of the Republic, single questions, and draft regulation. The main features of the Council of State's advisory functions are analysed, devoting special attention to most recent trends, which show how the advisory function tends to go beyond individual cases and opinions in order to support reform processes as a whole.
Administrative court records are increasingly used to study the prevalence of eviction. Yet inaccuracies in court records bias estimates of eviction and distort tenants' true rental histories. This ...is the first study to systematically assess the prevalence of inaccuracies across jurisdictions. Drawing on over 3.6 million administrative eviction court records from 12 states, we find that, on average, 22% of eviction records contain ambiguous information on how the case was resolved or falsely represent a tenant's eviction history. Adjusting for multiple inaccuracies in the data produces significantly different eviction rate estimates. Cases with increased complexity, such as those involving multiple tenants and lawyers, are more likely to contain inaccuracies. However, inaccuracies vary most prominently between states, indicating that state court system characteristics fundamentally shape the official record of the evicted population.
This article looks at the entanglements of income and love in the implementation of family reunification legislation by Finnish immigration bureaucrats and administrative courts, and specifically the ...ways in which the requirements to display a 'real' relationship and the income requirement play out for citizens and non-citizens. This is not as straightforward as it seems - both elements, emotions and income, play a role even in cases in which they are not officially part of the requirements. Citizens and non-citizens can mobilise different arguments when trying to convince the authorities that their relationship is real. Even if citizens have a wider array of arguments they can use, such as leveraging a low income that forces them to live under certain conditions, it seems that their unions are scrutinised more carefully, and they also have more difficulties in obtaining a residence permit. For cases in which both partners are non-citizens, the income requirement overrides questions of emotional attachment even in cases that involve children. The results of this article point to the need for more detailed research on the workings of immigration legislation on the ground, in particular, in regard to citizenship.
Ethnographically exploring how German judges in administrative courts of first instance navigate the practical, political, legal and ethical dilemmas of deciding on asylum appeals, this article ...identifies the oral hearing in asylum adjudication as a site of citizenship struggles in which rights claims by noncitizens undergo subtle transformations through the manner in which procedural rules are interpreted and enacted. Building on observations of asylum appeal hearings, conversations and focus group discussions with judges, I show that practices and sentiments of procedural justice among asylum appeal judges are at the core of these transformations. Hence, I argue for renewed analytical and conceptual attention to citizenship struggles that take place in webs of social relations within the realm of state law and across a graduated set of formal legal statuses for noncitizens.
After the electoral victories of 2015, PiS transformed the CT from an effective, counter-majoritarian device to scrutinise laws for their unconstitutionality, into a powerless institution paralysed ...by consecutive bills rendering it unable to review new PiS laws, and then into a positive supporter of the enhanced majoritarian powers. In a fundamental reversal of the traditional role of a constitutional court, it is now being used to protect the government from laws enacted long before PiS rule. Whatever else constitutional courts around the world are expected to do, there is no doubt that their first and primary function is to ensure adherence to a constitution and its protection against legislative majorities. In Poland, the Tribunal became a defender and protector of the legislative majority. This changed role, combined with general distrust of the CT and concerns about legitimacy of its judgments, explains also the extraordinary drop in the number of its judgments. For all practical purposes, the CT as a mechanism of constitutional review has ceased to exist: a reliable aide of the government and parliamentary majority has been born.
Scholars have long sought to resolve whether and to what degree political actor diversity influences the outputs of political institutions like legislatures, administrative agencies, and courts. When ...it comes to the judiciary, diverse judges may greatly affect outcomes. Despite this potential, no consensus exists for whether judicial diversity affects behavior in trial courts—that is, the stage where the vast majority of litigants interact with the judicial branch. After addressing the research design limitations in previous trial court-diversity studies, the results here indicate that a trial judge's sex and race have very large effects on his or her decision making. These results have important implications for how we view diversity throughout the judiciary and are particularly timely given the Obama Administration's over 200 female and minority appointments to the federal trial courts.
As part of the UCLA Law Review’s Symposium on The Safeguards of Our Constitutional Republic, this Article argues that it is a mistake to fixate on courts as the core safeguard in the modern ...administrative state. So much of administrative law happens without courts. Put differently, federal agencies regulate us in many meaningful, and sometimes frightening, ways that either evade judicial review entirely or are at least substantially insulated from such review. This Article surveys the phenomenon. It sketches out seven categories of such agency action, drawing on examples from both the Obama and Trump Administrations and highlighting some of the relevant scholarship. The Article concludes with a few observations concerning the implications of administrative law without courts for administrative law theory and doctrine and a call for more scholarly attention.
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