Outside Actors and Constitutional Court Decision Making (Pre-Recorded)

• In Event: Lawyers and External Actors in the Judicial Process

Abstract

Outside actors and interest groups have long been known to influence the decision making of the U.S. Supreme Court (e.g. Collins 2008) and, more recently, the common law world (Collins and McCarthy 2017). Recent research also indicates the observations submitted by member state governments can play an important role in European Court of Justice outcomes (Carrubba and Gabel 2015; Dederke and Naurin 2017). Despite a civil law tradition of not accepting amicus briefs (Kochevar 2013), the constitutional courts of continental Europe today regularly accept outside briefs, and in some cases even ask specific parties to submit briefs. Accordingly, these courts have seen an increasing number of outside actors submitting briefs. Along with this increase in brief submission, the relevance of these outside actors to constitutional justice

In this paper we investigate the factors that motivate outside actor brief submission in these courts, taking into account the institutional and legal differences that arise in this comparative inquiry. A dataset of outcomes from five constitutional courts is used to empirically examine the factors that influence brief submission.

Authors

• Benjamin Bricker, Southern Illinois University, Carbondale

• Scott A. Comparato, Southern Illinois University, Carbondale