State Supreme Courts and the Effects of Statutory Constraint
Do state supreme court judges render decisions according to their ideological preferences, or are they constrained by the language of state statutes? Using data from the Judge-Level State Supreme Court Database, the authors analyze the votes of individual judges from 1995 to 1998 to determine whether their behavior is constrained by legislation. The results indicate that more detailed language (resulting in statutes with higher word counts) significantly limits the discretion afforded to liberal judges while simultaneously facilitating the ideological voting of their conservative colleagues.
The Influence of Justices on U.S. Supreme Court Precedent
Judicial impact studies frequently consider the influence of Supreme Court decisions on future decision-making behavior. However, a critical void in the literature is analysis of the influence of individual Supreme Court justices on future decision making behavior. We investigate whether there are inherent differences between the opinions of individual justices and whether these opinions differentially impact future Supreme Court decisions. That is, we examine whether certain justices receive higher levels of citations and positive treatments in future Supreme Court decisions. To test our predictions we analyze majority opinions from the longest natural Court era of the U.S. Supreme Court between 1994 and 2005. The empirical results support our account and demonstrate that differences between the opinions of individual justices disparately impact the extent to which the Court cites and follows the opinions authored by each justice in its future decisions. Our analysis suggest that in addition to the voting coalition that decides the case outcome, which of the justices ultimately author the majority opinion has a profound impact on future citation and adherence to the Court’s precedent.
The Area of Freedom, Security and Justice ten years on: Successes and future challenges under the Stockholm Programme. CEPS Paperbacks. June 2010
This book celebrates the tenth anniversary of the Area of Freedom, Security and Justice (AFSJ) by bringing together the views of key practitioners and policy-makers who have played an outstanding role in thinking about and shaping EU policies on freedom, security and justice. 
 
Ten years ago, the member states transferred competences to the EU for law and policy-making in the fields of immigration, asylum and border controls, and began the transfer process for criminal justice and policing. This decade of European cooperation on AFSJ policies has experienced very dynamic convergence, the enactment of a large body of European law and the setting-up of numerous EU agencies working in these domains. Such dynamism in policy-making has not been without challenges and vulnerabilities, however. As this collective volume shows, the main dilemmas that lie ahead relate to an effective (while more plural) institutional framework under the Treaty of Lisbon, stronger judicial scrutiny through a greater role for national courts and the Court of Justice in Luxembourg, better mechanisms for evaluating and monitoring the implementation of EU AFSJ law and a more solid fundamental rights strategy. The contributions in this volume address the progress achieved so far in these policy areas, identify the challenges for future European cooperation in the AFSJ and put forward possible paths for making more progress in the next generation of the EU’s AFSJ.