Research projects

Judicial Loyalties and Resistance in Southeast Asia (DP230102553, 2023-2026)

This project is designed to stimulate new insights, for both theory and practice, into how courts in Southeast Asia are responding to growing politicization, interference by other branches, and political backlash. The study will advance understanding of the rule of law, democratic governance, and judicial politics and launch a new database on how high court justices defend judicial institutions and constitutional practice. The findings should help both academics and policymakers to better understand how political, social, and ideational networks of judges can affect the ability of courts to resist threats to constitutional democracy as they arise.

Informality and Judicial Institutions: Comparative Perspectives (Book project), with Sanchez-Urribarri and Stroh

The edited volume proposes a relational approach to the study of judicial politics outside of Western democracies. The articles illuminate how common political interests, ideas, social identity, family and professional ties and even patron-client obligations between judges and other actors shape a variety of phenomena of interest to the study of judicial institutions, in terms of how the judiciary is organised and administered, how judges are appointed and make decisions, and the prospects for judicial reform. Collectively, the articles explore the informal dimension of judicial politics in a systematic fashion, through rich empirical case studies in very different contexts. Thus, they help structure a new comparative agenda for research on informal judicial politics outside of the West.