LIST OF PANELS

From a broad perspective, we aim to collect papers that support for this ‘policy turn’ in the study of judicial systems. In this vein, the panel aims to look at the role and the goals of the different actors, the resources they put in the arena and the mechanisms they activate to reach they policy outcomes. First of all, we encourage papers focusing on modernization and innovation policies in the judicial sector, and adopting theoretical models and frameworks drawn from public policy analysis. We welcome papers with a comparative view, as well as on specific national case study (that will be used for summative analysis and discussions, to maintain the comparative orientation of the panel). Another aim of the panel is to stimulate a debate covering the approaches that could be used for this type of analysis. Specifically, although for a long time, the most influential way for analysing was the so-called ‘stage heuristic/policy cycle model’, new theoretical frameworks emerged at the end of the 1980s, with the aim to develop testable and falsifiable causal theories, and to identify causal factors that govern the policy process: the Advocacy Coalition Framework; the Multiple-Streams Framework; the Punctuated-Equilibrium Framework. In the last decade, nevertheless, some relevant proposals have maintained their foundations on the policy cycle approach with new and interesting perspectives, inclined to preserve both an actor-centered orientation and the micro-foundation of the researches. We can remember here for instance, the works on policy design and policy instruments; a renewed interest on the analysis of implementation processes and on policy evaluation, due to the researches on capacity building and on the identification of social mechanisms; the researches about policy learning and policy transfer, that influenced the studies on agenda setting, decision making processes and implementation too. As some of those approaches seem to be promising for the study of policy change and innovation in the judicial sector, this panel aims to be the venue for new research proposals adopting these models and to stimulate a long-lasting discussion on the study of the judicial policies.

The deep awareness of the rising power of the judiciary is at the present time widely shared by laypeople and scholars. Although from different perspectives, they both understand courts as increasingly influential in our daily life and in the way politics and society are shaped. For different reasons in fact judicial institutions and judicial reforms gained the attention of international watchdogs, domestic politicians, media, opinion makers, as well as comparative social and legal experts. All this said, it is still open to questions, the way the judiciary should be analysed in a public policy perspective. Even sticking to a superficial overview of the most scholarship developed over the last three four decades, one might safely argue that the dominant view adopted to observe the judicial policies considers the formal rules and the explicit proceduralised mechanisms by means of which courts and public prosecutor offices do work. In this manner judicial institutions are compared as systems. The dimensions of comparison are mostly the following ones: recruitment, appointment, evaluation, discipline. These dimensions are measured and analysed focusing mainly on the systemic macro-variables. In other and more radical view, a system centred approach is preferred to an actor-centred approach. Empirical reasons seem to encourage moving forward and praising a paradigm shift. We limit our reasons to the empirical domain. Over the last two decades, specially in the European area a wide range of strategies, actions, initiatives, programs, of many different kinds have been supported by domestic and transnational institutions in order to promote the so called quality of justice. The shift is not only political in its own nature. It has progressively changed the relative balance between structural variables and agency in the governance of the judiciary. As a matter of fact, today most of the changes injected into the judicial governance comes from the combination of opportunities and arenas opened up by networks composed by local, national and transnational actors, and by the resources, motivations, leadership, capacities brought into them by judicial and non-judicial actors who are willing to promote quality or simply to change existing, and considered ineffective, things. From a theoretical point of view, the explanation of these changes needs a different approach, based on public policies frameworks and actor-centred. This should, in the view of the promoters of this panel, come by considering at the heart of the research agenda the innovation/modernization policies of the judiciary, with a strong emphasis on the comparative orientation.