An Ecology of Rulings

• In Event: 40461 - Section on Sociology of Law Roundtables
  In Refereed Roundtable (60 minute): Table 2: Judge and Prosecutorial Decision Making

Abstract

This paper is to establish that the exercise of judicial discretion in high courts is driven in large part by attention scarcity. I use the rule ecology framework developed by March et al. (2000), in which populations of rules inhabit a sort of ecology and different problems compete for the limited attention of judges and their clerks. I use data on all rulings made by the Colombian Constitutional Court (CCC) between 1992 and 2024 to establish the validity of this view. An important picture about appellate courts emerges from this analysis: every high court is best understood as an organizational actor that follows its own agenda and imposes "structure" on the flow of incoming cases.

Author

• Andres Castro Araujo, Duke University