—Björn Dressel, Australian National University, Raul A. Sanchez Urribarri, La Trobe University, Alexander Stroh, University of Bayreuth We are pleased to share with the scholarly community the publication of a special issue of the International Political Science Review – Informal Networks and Judicial Institutions: Comparative Perspectives (Vol. 39, No 5, 2018). Throughout the world, judicial institutions –

Brazil’s Increasingly Politicized Supreme Court
—Juliano Zaiden Benvindo, University of Brasília Brazil was faced with a tragic event this January. Justice Teori Zavascki, one of the most respected members of the Brazilian Supreme Court, was one of the five victims of a plane crash into the sea near Paraty, a colonial town off the coast of Rio de Janeiro state.

Corporate Campaign Contributions in Brazil: Of Courts, Congresses, and the Agendas of Individual Justices
—Juliano Zaiden Benvindo, University of Brasilia Debates over the relationship between Congress and the Judiciary are quite common in the comparative constitutional literature, especially in the current scenario of rising activism of constitutional courts worldwide. Particularly interesting is to observe how Supreme Courts and Parliaments negotiate the pace of their decisions, sometimes in a symbiotic

The Indonesian Constitutional Court in Crisis over the Chief Justice’s Term Limit
—Stefanus Hendrianto, Santa Clara University On January 12, 2015, the Indonesian Constitutional Court Justices unanimously elected Arief Hidayat, a lesser-known academic from Diponegoro University, as the new Chief Justice. After his inauguration, Hidayat stated that “the process [of election] was very smooth.” But before Hidayat took over the reign of Chief of Justice in a