4 - Challenges of Studying Judges

Summary

While the role of judges has changed dramatically due to the vanishing trial phenomenon, the change has generally slipped under the radar. The extent and nature of the transformation of judicial roles usually cannot be deduced from reading legislation or official public legal records. This stands in stark contrast to the information age, in which a wealth of public information and a forthcoming attitude toward supplying additional information might be hoped for. In this chapter, we describe the transparency problem and our efforts to persuade courts to divulge information. Notable, this problem, which confronted us as researchers, is compounded in the case of individual litigants who have fewer means to surmount it. We describe the methodological approach that developed in the course of our research to surmount the data challenge. We show the strengths and weaknesses of each research method that we used and the way in which combined research methods have an added value, compensating for weaknesses and uncovering blind spots. By conducting court observations, coding actual court files, and analyzing them quantitatively, while interviewing judges and other legal actors, we were able to obtain a rich picture of the trajectory of cases as they move toward settlement.