IPSA Research Committee for Comparative Judicial Studies

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 papers presented at several of these meetings have appeared in many books and journals.

The RCCJS seeks to bring the comparative study of law, courts, and the judicial process within the mainstream of public law scholarship. Its members examine law and judicial phenomena in two or more countries in an attempt to move toward a more general theory of the nature of judicial institutions and judicial behavior. They seek additional evidence for the leading theories of judicial process developed from single-country studies. Take, for example, the question whether or to what extent courts make policy. Comparative judicial scholars have refined the understanding of the functional roles of courts in society by showing the nature and extent of judicial policy making in a variety of settings. They also have contributed to the understanding of some fundamental characteristics of judicial systems, such as judicial independence, the “judicialization” of politics, legal mobilization, judicial review, and judicial legitimacy.

For forty years, the RCCJS has provided a scholarly forum for the sharing of comparative research on law and courts. Researchers in the field have made considerable progress in shedding light on many fundamental aspects of judicial process. Nevertheless, more work is needed. Today the RCCJS is extending its focus outward, to encourage more studies of non–North American, non-European, and non-Australasian courts, and downward, to include courts below the highest appellate courts.