On Constructing a Science of Comparative Judicial Politics: Tate & Haynie's “Authoritarianism and the Functions of Courts”

Abstract

Tate and Haynie's (1993) recent essay in these pages on the functions of courts in authoritarian regimes is evidence of an increasing interest among American political scientists in the comparative study of judicial politics. There have always been a few among us who have argued for the benefits of broadening our perspectives beyond the American judiciary. As the story goes, the effort began 30 years ago with just a handful of pioneers meeting in a Dallas hotel room to discuss ways to make comparative judicial studies a more conspicuous feature of public law scholarship among political scientists (see Abraham 1987). Over the years a fairly diverse and distinguished group of social scientists have contributed to this effort (see Tate 1987). By 1981 there was sufficient interest among scholars affiliated with the International Political Science Association to convene the Mansfield College Conference on Comparative Judicial Studies. That same year Martin Shapiro gave a boost to these effort with the publication of his influential and widely read Courts: A Comparative and Political Analysis . Still, it was not until 1987 that the first collection of essays was published on “comparative judicial systems,” and even then the papers in that volume were characterized in the subtitle as representing “challenging frontiers in conceptual and empirical analysis” (Schmidhauser 1987). Over the course of 30 years a few more pioneers were recruited, but apparently the terrain was still a frontier.

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