This article reviews the book by Professor Charles C. Jalloh, The Legal Legacy of the Special Court for Sierra Leone, published in 2020 by Cambridge University Press. In this book, the author examines the “hybrid” international/national criminal tribunal, known as the Special Court for Sierra Leone (SCSL), which was created under a pathbreaking bilateral treaty between the United Nations (UN) and the country of Sierra Leone as a UN member state. Jalloh seeks to evaluate the contributions made by SCSL to the development of international criminal law. In particular, he assesses the scope and significance of SCSL legal contributions from its solutions to problems arising between its opening and the completion of its work in 2013, having to do with personal and temporal jurisdiction; gender crimes as crimes against humanity; recruitment of children as war crimes; head-of-state immunity; amnesty; and tensions between criminal tribunals and truth commissions. Keywords: ICTR; Kabbah, Ahmad Tejan; Liberia; Lomé Peace Agreement; Rome Statute; RUF; Sierra Leone civil war; Sierra Leonean law; SCSL appeals chamber, trial chambers, registrar's office, prosecutor's office, and defense office; Taylor, Charles; temporal jurisdiction; The Hague; Truth and Reconciliation Commission; United Nations (UN) Secretary-General, Security Council, and Resolution 1315

On May 11, 2018, Maria Lourdes Sereno was removed from office as the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court of the Philippines. She had been a vocal critic of controversial President Rodrigo Duterte, and he had labeled her as an “enemy.” While she was under legislative impeachment investigation, Duterte’s solicitor general filed a quo warranto petition in the Supreme Court to challenge her right to hold office. The Supreme Court responded to that petition by ordering her removal, which her supporters claimed was politically-motivated and possibly unconstitutional. The story of Chief Justice Sereno should give urgency to the need for us to consider the proposition that maintaining the rule of law can be difficult, and that attacks on judicial independence can pose a grave threat to democracy. The article presented here considers the impeachment of Chief Justice David Brock in the American state of New Hampshire in 2000, identifying the most significant institutional causes and consequences of an event that presented a crisis for the judiciary and the state. It offers a case study for the readers of this journal to reflect not only on the removal of Chief Justice Sereno, but also on the kinds of constitutional issues, such as judicial independence, judicial accountability, and separation of powers in any democracy, as arising from in conflicts between the judiciary and another branch of government.

In recent years, constitutional jurisprudence emerging from state courts has assumed increasing importance. The assertiveness of state courts, however, has generated considerable backlash, most often involving adverse reactions to particular court rulings, and commonly expressed in efforts to oust the judges responsible through the electoral or appointive processes by which judges in most states maintain their positions. In New Hampshire, there was a backlash involving a deeper challenge to the legitimacy of the entire judicial branch of government, driven by concerns about judicial accountability to citizens and officials in the elected branches. This Article looks at the impeachment of Chief Justice David Brock in 2000, in terms of its antecedents and its aftermath. The authors place the impeachment in the context of legislative judicial relations over the course of the state's history and examine steps taken since the impeachment to help restore stability in those relations.

This study compared criminal disposition time for child-sexual-abuse cases and other felonies in the Arizona Superior Court for Maricopa County. Of those resolved, the majority of both child-sexual-abuse cases (59 percent) and felony cases (85 percent) were disposed within the target time frame of 180 days. However, nearly one in three child-sexual-abuse cases took more than two years to reach disposition or were pending. The average pending time for child-sexual-abuse cases were two-and-one-half times that for all pending felonies in general.

As a public institution, the courts must be accountable for their use of a nation’s resources. The institutional independence of the judiciary from political influences and the decisional independence of individual judges in specific cases are intended not for the personal benefit of judges, but for the benefit of the society as a whole and of all those who come before the courts. Indeed, the very legitimacy of government as a whole can be powerfully reinforced by the effective operation of an independent judiciary.

/^\ne of the difficulties of specialization is that experts in different fields may become so idiosyncratic in their focus and methods that they miss the opportunity to learn from those outside their specialty areas. The differences in perspectives between those who lead and manage the operation of state courts and those who study the operation of state courts as academic social scientists is an example of this problem. Judges and court managers face daily pressures to see that cases are decided justly and promptly, with prudent use of finite resources. Social-science scholars, on the other hand, face constant pressures to publish to achieve tenure and maintain professional status. This may often cause a focus on narrow issues considered most pressing or most immediate ly relevant to other specialists in the same field. This leads judges and court managers in one direction, to focus on the state of their dockets and their interactions with such other stakeholders as lawyers and elected officials. It leads social-science scholars toward critical analysis of recent work by colleagues and an effort to demonstrate appro priate methodological rigor, with the unfortunate consequence at times that their work products may become opaque, impenetrable, and potentially irrelevant to judges and court managers. To the extent that social scientists studying state courts wish to make their work relevant to a wider audience, it is worthwhile to learn about the components and implications of broad issues and trends that are most important to such state court leaders as chief justices, trial judges, and state and trial court administrators, as well as such key stakeholders as general counsel for large corporations and other lawyers. This article presents highlights from the results of an annual survey of constituents con ducted in February 2008 by the National Center for State Courts (NCSC). Although the survey was not conducted under rigorous methodological controls, the responses from state court stakeholders should be instructive for social scientists.

Italy may have the largest backlog and the slowest pace of civil and criminal litigation among all western countries. This article represents an effort to outline some of the issues associated with delay in Italian courts and to consider whether solutions to delay from the American experience might be helpful for Italian courts and in countries with similar problems. After a brief examination of the tribunal in Bologna as an example of case processing in Italian general-jurisdiction courts of first instance, the article outlines possible suggestions for improvement that might be offered to this court based on the American experience-such as time standards and limitation of unnecessary continuances. It is not easy to apply such remedies in Italian courts, and the authors describe five factors that would impede any effort to implement suggestions for improvement based on the American experience. They conclude by offering ideas on what might be necessary for an Italian court to provide "a fair and public hearing within a reasonable time by an independent and impartial tribunal established by law," as provided in the European Convention on Human Rights.

Research on court delay in the late 1970s has led us to focus more on ''local legal culture'' than on court resources and formal rules or procedures in our efforts to improve the pace of litigation. In the 1980s, aggressive case flow management was an important part of our efforts to change local legal culture. Yet our overall results have been mixed. What must we do in the future? We must take further steps to refine caseflow management, but we must at the same time consider other factors possibly linked to local legal culture that could be changed through Other kinds of programs. Court structure and the resources available to courts cannot be overlooked, and such theories of organization dynamics as the ''Abilene Paradox'' may suggest further ways to address the problem.

In the opening of his address delivered to the annual convention of the American Bar Association in 1906, Roscoe Pound observed that popular dissatisfaction with the administration of justice is as old as the law itself (Pound, 1906). He then set out to describe the causes of such popular dissatisfaction, offering suggestions for improvement so that, "we may look forward to a near future when our courts will be swift and certain agents of justice, whose decisions will be acquiesced in and respected by all." Because of Pound's influence, the American Judicature Society was organized in 1913 to enlist the aid of citizens in a search for better justice. Subsequent efforts at improvement involved the American Bar Associa tion, the Institute of Judicial Administration, the Federal Judicial Center, the Institute for Court Management, and the National Center for State Courts, as well as innumerable independent citizens' groups. Yet 70 years after Pound's address, the intransigence of some of the causes of dissatis faction that he identified, as well as the emergence of new problems, led U.S. Supreme Court Chief Justice Warren Burger to observe that there is an ongoing need to probe for fundamental changes and major overhaul in our courts, rather than simply "tinkering" (Burger, 1976). Tension in the relationship between citizens and the courts is thus not a new concern. Although our court system must continue to strive for effec tiveness and efficiency in its operations, it must also, as Justice Paul C. Reardon observed, "be more determined than ever to deliver the best possible service to the community and to open its doors to greater account ability and citizen involvement" (Reardon, 1978). In this special issue of The Justice System Journal, the articles probe the important relationship between courts and the citizenry that they serve. In recent years there has been considerable citizen concern about drunk driving. In "Mandatory Confinement as a Response to Community Con cerns About Drunk Driving," Fred Heinzelmann discusses the impact of *Dale Anne Sipes is a senior staff attorney at the Western Regional Office of the National Center for State Courts. ** David C. Steelman is a senior staff attorney of the Northwest Regional Office of the National Center for State Courts.