Informality has long been valued in England, and this is true of the political process as well as the institution of the judiciary. In both cases, it is assumed that the senior figures will have absorbed unwritten conventions and will by osmosis naturally understand their respective role in the UK constitution. Much is now starting to change, at least as far as the English judiciary is concerned. It is, first, argued that informal judicial institutions did not become redundant when the separation of powers was formally introduced with a program of modernization of the judiciary in the Constitutional Reform Act 2005. Selected illustrations of persisting informal judicial institutions are then discussed in relation to the deliberative processes in senior courts; to judicial selection and appointments; and to the disciplinary process. Second, informal judicial institutions are deeply connected with the UK constitutional tradition. The Brexit litigation laid bare the challenges of containing political behavior within certain boundaries, and the unwritten conventions which have bound the judiciary and the executive might now be instinctively understood and shared by only one of these two parties.

Political finance in liberal democracies is often regarded as a source of pathology accompanied by demands for reform. But on what principles and values should political finance reform be grounded? The existing scholarship provides no more than sketchy advice on such matters. To address this gap, this paper presents a normative framework to evaluate political finance rules, which proposes (a) that the design of such rules should take account of the party system in which the financing rules will operate; (b) that both political finance rules and party systems should be evaluated in terms of three normative dimensions of partisanship (collegiality, systemic voice, and systemic accountability); and (c) that political finance reforms ought to counterbalance the pathologies inherent to different party systems. A set of political finance rules that satisfies these three conditions is an instantiation of what we describe as the ‘civic model of political finance’.

Collective decision-making is often taken as an ‘institutional fact’ when it comes to supreme and constitutional courts. In this article, we focus on the example of the Brazilian Supreme Court (Supremo Tribunal Federal, or STF) to argue that this feature should not be assumed from the outset, as it does not necessarily hold, across countries, for all relevant powers that courts may have. As this example illustrates, the assignment to individual Justices of three distinct powers, namely agenda setting, position taking, and decision making, can have profound effects on the legislative status quo outside the court, amounting in some circumstances to a form of individual judicial review. This expanded typology of court powers both points to an underexplored spectrum for comparing different courts and makes it necessary to discuss if and how particular distributions of such powers within multi-member courts are normatively justified. In the specific case of the STF, we argue that the specific combination of individual allocations of agenda setting and decision-making powers, which gives rise in practice to the possibility of individual judicial review, cannot be reconciled with basic tenets of constitutional theory.

This paper explores how the new Communist government developed a political consciousness of discipline and collegiality among traditional rural midwives in Chinese villages during the 1950s. It argues that selected traditional rural midwives were taught to observe discipline by attending meetings and studying, and to develop collegiality with peers through criticism and self-criticism of their birth attendance techniques and personal characters in short training courses from 1951 onwards. A legitimized midwife identity gradually formed in rural communities, but with it came conflicts and rivalry. By keeping these midwives under institutional surveillance and creating a dynamic and constant moulding process, the new government intended to foster professional and political discipline and collegiality within the group based on a normativized notion of selflessness performed within a changing series of indoctrination schemes that demonstrated continuity and complementarity and which I have described as common, preliminary, institutionalized, and dynamic schemes. This article examines how the state attempted to retrain marginalized and derided midwives with appropriate class backgrounds in order to incorporate them into the modern medical world, then still dominated by doctors and nurses with suspect class backgrounds. Ironically, in creating “socialist new people” to intervene in traditional rural birthing practices and introducing fee-for-service professionalism, the CCP accidentally created a degree of petit-capitalist thinking among women whose traditional mode of work may have been more selfless, thus complicating the process of indoctrinating selfless dedication.