The International Political Science Association (IPSA) is an association of more than 1,200 scholars from around the globe. These scholars organize into groups or research committees devoted to specific areas of research in a field of political science. The Research Committee for Comparative Judicial Studies (RCCJS, recently sometimes called Comparative Judicial Systems) is one of the IPSA's fifty-one active research committees, consisting of nearly two hundred political scientists and academic lawyers from more than thirty countries.

The RCCJS, founded in 1964 by several American political scientists, including Henry Abraham, who were beginning to study law and courts from a comparative perspective, determined that an association would help promote this burgeoning field. Since then, a group of scholars has met annually at universities around the globe. The ...