INTEREST GROUPS AND LITIGATION
Interest groups engaged in litigation are faced with questions of litigation strategy and of allocation of resources. Planned constitutional litigation, part of mobilization of the law, is problematic, as is the choice of forum in which the litigation is brought. Litigation by interest groups is affected by the political environment, including judicial rulings; the complexity of litigation itself; inter-organizational relations; and, most importantly, a series of intra-organizational factors. The latter include control of litigation, group longevity, relations between lawyers and organization, and organizational structure. These elements of interest group litigation are explored in this article.
Judicial Agenda Setting Through Signaling and Strategic Litigant Responses
We show that when justices hand down decisions that provide signals – indications of their priorities and preferences – policy entrepreneurs bring well crafted cases in those policy areas, resulting in a transformation of the Supreme Court’s agenda. The implications are twofold: 1) Supreme Court justices can summon cases onto their agenda, well before the certiorari process begins, by informally communicating their priorities and preferences to potential litigants, and 2) Supreme Court justices are dependent on extrajudicial actors for access to a sufficient number of well framed cases to make comprehensive policy in areas that they consider priorities.
Translating Legal Language and Comparative Law
Legal texts are in the focus of both lawyers and translators. This paper discusses the binary opposition of these two views especially in the light of contract law. There is one crucial epistemic difference between the point of view of the translator and the lawyer when it comes to the interpretation of legal texts. In the translator’s view legal text is traditionally conceived as static as to its nature; something that already exists in the form of text. Traditionally, the translator is interested in the text itself as it was written down in a document, i.e. the translator needs to go back to the frozen moment when a legal document was constructed and finalised. The lawyer, in contrast, is very much interested not only in the text of the legal document but also in the contextual surroundings of the text. In fact, for legal interpretation, sometimes the key-elements for the interpretation come from outside of the text itself. This paper concludes that legal translation is in many cases closer to transcreation than it is to traditionally understood translation.