An Introduction to the CompLaw Database

We introduce a new database on constitutional review conducted by high courts in the world’s judicial systems (CompLaw), which is designed to promote research on issues of constitutionalism. Among others, scholars are interested in understanding the degree to which institutional design can insulate judges from political pressure and thus advance the rule of law. To date, our best answers are gained by stitching together evidence from a variety of country specific research. Yet, these questions naturally lend themselves to a comparative, cross-national study. Complaw is a new database on constitutional review conducted by high courts designed to help provide the data necessary to conduct such analysis. In this paper, we introduce the database and illustrate its potential value for research through an illustrative application. We introduce a new database on constitutional review conducted by high courts in the world’s judicial systems (CompLaw). CompLaw currently contains information on courts, cases and political systems in 43 states. Data capture continues in an additional 30 states. CompLaw was designed primarily to leverage cross-national variation in institutions and political conditions to evaluate theoretical claims about the political nature of constitutional review. The detailed nature of CompLaw’s coding procedures, as well as it’s database management plan, make it useful to a variety of research interests. This paper describes the creation, organization, and current content of the database. We also illustrate its potential value for research by presenting an empirical analysis using these data. Specifically, we use these data to examine whether political constraints on judicial behavior proposed by numerous models of judicial politics are weakened by (1) formal institutions insulating judges from undue political influence and (2) public support for courts. Empirical research in the field of law and courts has centered historically on the United States, yet, its full empirical scope has always been international (Tate, N.d.). Today, we are seeing an explosion of comparative research. Figure 1 plots the number of articles and books in comparative judicial politics published in the discipline’s major journals or university presses between 1990 and 2009. As the figure shows, the volume of research produced in this area has increased dramatically over the last 10 to 12 years. Specifically, of the 154 publications we identified, seventy-five percent have been published since 2000. It is unlikely that this trend will be reversed in the near term, as we are also seeing a renewed focus on comparative graduate training. This is reflected in part by the dissertations recognized by the judicial subfield. Between 1980 and 1999, a single comparative dissertation won the American Political Science Associations Corwin Award for best doctoral work in the field of public law (Charles Epp’s in 1996), yet since 2000, nearly 40% of awards have gone to comparativists. This work was supported by a grant from the National Science Foundation (SES 0751340), and by the Center for Empirical Research in the Law, Washington University, and the Halle Institute, Emory University. We are extremely grateful for the excellent research support of numerous research assistants on this project at Emory, Washington University and Rochester. We are particularly grateful to Michael Gibilsco, Nathan Brown, Katie Blundell. Prepared for presentation at the 2012 Annual Meeting of the American Political Science Association. We conducted a keyword search for articles in the ISI Web of Science and JSTOR databases, using the following journals: American Political Science Review, American Journal of Political Science, Journal of Politics, Comparative Political Studies and the British Journal of Political Science. Specifically, we searched in the title field for “courts” and/or “judicial. ” We then read the abstracts for each paper in the list, identifying those papers that had a regional or global focus (i.e. setting aside work in American politics). For books, we used the WorldCat/First Search database to conduct the same keyword search using Cambridge University Press, Harvard University Press, Stanford University Press, Princeton University Press, Michigan University Press and Oxford University Press. Finally, we compared our list to the research reviewed in Tate’s (N.d.) review of the field. We added any paper or book that our search missed. See the American Political Science Association website for information on past winners (http://www. apsanet.org/content_4122.cfm, accessed August 20, 2012).