Judicial decision-making may ideally be impartial, but in reality it is influenced by many different factors, including institutional context, ideological commitment, fellow justices on a panel, and personal preference. Empirical literature in this area increasingly analyzes this complex collection of factors in isolation, when a larger sample size of comparative institutional contexts can help assess the impact of the procedures, norms, and rules on key institutional decisions, such as how appeals are decided. Four basic institutional questions from a comparative perspective help address these studies regardless of institutional context or government framework. Who decides, or how is a justice appointed? How does an appeal reach the court; what processes occur? Who is before the court, or how do the characteristics of the litigants and third parties affect judicial decision-making? How does the court decide the appeal, or what institutional norms and strategic behaviors do the judges perform to obtain their preferred outcome? This book explains how the answers to these institutional questions largely determine the influence of political preferences of individual judges and the degree of cooperation among judges at a given point in time.

The authors apply these four fundamental institutional questions to empirical work on the Supreme Courts of the US, UK, Canada, India, and the High Court of Australia. The ultimate purpose of this book is to promote a deeper understanding of how institutional differences affect judicial decision-making, using empirical studies of supreme courts in countries with similar basic structures but with sufficient differences to enable meaningful comparison.

Benjamin Alarie holds the Osler Chair in Business Law in the Faculty of Law, University of Toronto and is an affiliated faculty member at the Vector Institute for Artificial Intelligence.

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"The law is not an abstract ideal, but something that emerges from a specific institutional context. This book builds on this key idea to analyze how specific institutional features translate into specific legal experiences across several countries with well-established and highly varied legal systems. I highly recommend this book for anyone using comparative methods to understand how the law really works."

--Michael A. Bailey, Colonel William J. Walsh Professor, Department of Government and McCourt School of Public Policy, Georgetown University

"In this ambitious and important book, Alarie and Green build a theory for how the way a court works affects the justice a court affords its citizens. The authors offer an innovative and parsimonious model of appellate court design that is trans-substantive and trans-continental. It will be required reading for those studying courts or seeking to improve them."

--Tracey E. George, Charles B. Cox III and Lucy D. Cox Family Professor in Law and Liberty

"A creative new approach to thinking about high courts and how judges do their work. Provides some valuable perspective on the U.S. Supreme Court and charts a path forward in the study of judicial politics."

--Keith E. Whittington, William Nelson Cromwell Professor of Politics, Princeton University

"How does the institutional design of a country's high court affect how judges decide cases? In this book, Alarie and Green produced a thoroughly modern, theoretically informed, and empirically grounded analysis of this longstanding question. This book should be required reading for anyone interested in comparative legal institutions."

--Kevin Quinn, Professor of Law, University of California, Berkeley