For at least three decades now, those charged with nominating and confirming justices to the U.S. Supreme Court seem to be following a norm of prior judicial experience—one that makes previous service on the (federal) bench a near prerequisite for office. Largely as a result of this norm, today’s Court, while growing more and more diverse on some dimensions, is becoming less and less so on the dimension of career diversity. We argue that all norms that cut against diversity are problematic because they reduce the ability of the affected group (the Supreme Court not excepted) to perform its tasks but that the norm of prior judicial experience is particularly troublesome for two reasons. First, since virtually all California Law Review show occupational path to be an important factor in explaining judicial choices—from the votes justices cast to their respect for stare decisis—the homogeneity induced by the norm suggests that the current Court is not making optimal choices. Second, since women and people of color are less likely than white men to hold positions that are now, under the norm of prior judicial experience, steppingstones to the bench, the norm is working to limit diversity on dimensions other than occupational path. To explore our argument, we draw on diverse sources—ranging from an original database that houses a wealth of information of the occupational backgrounds of the justices to the writings of leading contemporary thinkers. From this exploration, we extract a singular but certainly non-trivial policy implication: Because of problems associated with a perpetuation of the norm of prior judicial experience, we believe that the Senate, the President and other key players in the confirmat ion process would be well advised to give greater attention to the career experiences of those they would like to see serve on the Nation’s highest Court. But such attention ought not come in the form of reserving the next two, three, or four vacancies for nominees hailing directly from private practice, legislatures, the cabinet, and so on. Rather it should come about by taking into account the career experiences of justices remaining on the Court and, then, working to avoid excessive duplicati on.

Can weak judicial institutions facilitate the advancement of women to the high courts? We explore the relationship between weak institutions and gender diversification by analyzing the consequences of judicial reshuffles in Latin America. Our theory predicts that institutional disruptions will facilitate the appointment of women justices, but only when left parties control the nomination process. We test this argument using difference-in-differences and dynamic panel models for 18 Latin American countries between 1961 and 2014. The analysis offers support for our hypothesis, but gains in gender diversification are modest in size and hard to sustain over time. Political reshuffles may produce short-term advances for women in the judiciary, but do not represent a path to substantive progress in gender equality.

Abstract Law nº 13.769/2018, upon altering the Code of Criminal Procedure, regulates house arrest for pregnant women or for mothers responsible for children or the disabled. This research was dedicated to observing the construction of juridical meaning in the context of a very exceptional situation by way of Habeas Corpus (HC) in the appeal for house arrest in cases of pregnancy and imprisoned mothers with children less than 12 years of age. This demarcation has led us to a set of 122 decisions by the Supreme Justice Tribunal (STJ) and 3 by the Supreme Federal Court (STF), all sentencing having occurred between December 20, 2018 and December 19, 2019, representing the first year of validity for Law nº 13.769/2018. The decisions were collected from the electronic sites of the STJ and STF, using the following entries for searching: “13.769”, “situation” and “very exceptional”, “remand” and “house arrest”. The data was distributed onto an Excel spreadsheet and analyzed under the theoretical-methodological perspective of communicativation. The analysis treated methodological elements applied in empirical research on sentencing and the construction of juridical meaning and authorship, where rapporteur, vote and unanimity were not taken as transmitters of information and decisions, but as pertaining to wordings. The study made viable reflections that indicate the necessity for distancing from causal logic, at the same time promoting the application of reflexive circular logic, as proposed by the communicativationist perspective. What one stresses here is the impossibility of empirical research on juridical decision without transdisciplinary reflection. As for juridical meaning, we observe that it is not suited to a fixed meaning, but rather a constant process of construction, reconstruction and deconstruction of meaning. Observation reveals that three deliberations (drug trafficking at the residence, noncompliance with previous house arrest and participation in organized crime), having induced the construction of meaning in the direction of a very exceptional situation, are not contained in the legal text, nor in any judicial precedent, independent of their first-time application, non-application or reapplication. Finally, as a result of observing that within the same proceedings the same minister, whilst rapporteur votes for house arrest and whilst not rapporteur votes against it, we consider that it is not fitting to maintain authorship as though it would be responsible for the establishment of meaning. Preceding this, the juridical meaning of something is made and unmade due to juridical communication itself, not due to the author. The study, with these contributions, reveals how important and necessary it is to develop methodological and epistemological reflections about studies on juridical decision.

Abortions in the Soviet Union became much more accessible under the Khrushchev administration in 1953, and the USSR's abortion rate subsequently developed into the highest in the world. The Soviet government did not begin releasing official statistical data until the 1970s, however it is believed that around six or seven million abortions were carried out each year in the 1950s and 1960s; a figure that remained fairly consistent until the late 1980s**. This high rate was, in-part, due to rapid urbanization and a desire for smaller families, as well as the lack of quality contraceptives produced by the Soviet government, and the widespread belief that abortion was safer than the side-effects of hormonal regulation via the pill. Relative to population size, there were between 97 and 106 abortions carried out per 1,000 women aged between 15 and 49 in the given years, which is roughly equal to one in ten women of childbearing age having an abortion each year (estimates for Russia alone suggest that this number was one in six in the 1960s). There were however regional disparities across the Soviet Union, as abortions were much more accessible and common in the European part of the country, and less available or socially acceptable in the Muslim-majority and rural regions of Asia. Abortion in the U.S. In the U.S. during this time, the abortion rate was much lower due to previous legal restrictions and lack of access, societal attitudes, and better access to contraceptives. Prior to 1973, abortions were either banned outright or only available under specific circumstances in all-but-four states. The Supreme Court case Roe v. Wade then saw the removal of most federal restrictions relating to abortion in the first trimester of pregnancy. This granted women across the country greater access to legal abortions; in 1975 there were over one million legal abortions performed in the U.S., and between 1.5 and 1.6 million in the 1980s. Proportional to population size, this equated to 29 abortions per 1,000 women aged between 15 and 45 in 1980, which is roughly equal to one in 34 women of childbearing age having an abortion in this year. Legacy During the decline and dissolution of the Soviet Union, the government began to promote the use of contraceptives, however the poor quality and supply of these reinforced former perceptions that they were more harmful than abortions. Additionally, medical institutions received much higher sums from the government when abortions were performed (relative to income from contraceptives), and these incentives delayed the drop in Russian and other post-Soviet states' abortion rates. While it is now generally accepted that contraception is safer than abortion, and awareness of the risks of infertility and maternal death has become more widespread, today, Soviet successor states have some of the highest abortion rates in the world by a considerable margin.

In the U.S., following the peak of almost 30 abortions per 1,000 women aged 15 to 44 in the 1980s, the abortion rate has gradually fallen with each decade, even dropping below the 1973 level in 2017. Although this is a side effect of improvements in contraception and education, a large part of this decline can be attributed to restricted access to abortion, particularly in rural and southern regions. While the majority of U.S. adults support Roe v. Wade, the Supreme Court overturned the ruling in June 2022, granting states the right to determine their own abortion laws.