Seminar on Judicial Conduct

This seminar explores judicial conduct with references to the law that regulates judicial behavior and the influences on judicial decision-making. The first part of the seminar concerns how courts and judges are regulated, and include sessions on judicial ethics and discipline, judicial elections, judicial impeachment, and the roles of Congress and the President in promoting judicial independence and accountability. The second part of the seminar explores the influences on judicial decision-making. It will focus on perspectives from political science, psychology, and history, and explore the extent to which judges are subject to extrajudicial influences such as ideology, race, and threats to their reelection. The seminar seeks to synthesize the two parts by exploring whether and how the mechanisms discussed in the first part of the course can or should be employed to manage the influences on judicial decision-making that the second part of the course documents.