In the past twenty-five years, Ireland has moved from a traditional common law model of judicial administration, in which key aspects of judicial careers and administration were handled informally and politically, to a much more formal system designed along European lines. This transition is driven by Irish judges and politicians and influenced heavily by EU and Council of Europe soft law on judicial independence and the rule of law. In this article I sketch an outline of judicial institutions in Ireland before focusing on two topics that exemplify the transition: Judicial conduct and judicial appointments. I argue that the move to formalize judicial administration in Ireland is rooted in a desire to follow best practice but also to avoid politically difficult reforms in other areas.

Although Ireland is often cited as part of the vanguard of countries adopting forms of judicial self-governance in the 1990s, this appearance can be misleading: the Irish judiciary are self-governing only in limited respects. The judge-led Court Service is in charge of court estate, non-judicial personnel and provision of information on the court system to the public. Many key matters – discipline, promotions and deployment – remain largely out of the control of the corporate judiciary. Judicial appointments are significantly at the discretion of the government. In the last decade, there have been significant moves towards a more corporate judiciary and these are reflected in the creation of a judges’ representative body, the Association of Judges of Ireland, and a shadow Judges Council. There are currently proposals to create a new independent mechanism for appointing judges and to create a Judicial Council with a significant role in disciplining the judiciary.

The Irish experience highlights the importance of political and cultural factors in establishing and maintaining judicial independence and self-governance. Despite the significant role for the government in judicial appointments, and the presence of a culture of political patronage in these appointments, there is nonetheless a robust culture of individual judicial independence once judges have been appointed. The creation of the Courts Service in 1999 was a significant transfer of administrative power to the judiciary but it was approved without demur by the political branches, who welcomed the depoliticization of controversial decisions about court estate. Conversely, reforms to judicial appointments have been weak because politicians saw value in maintaining a relatively harmless form of political patronage, and proposals for a Judicial Council that have agreed in outline for two decades have yet to be enacted, apparently because they lack sufficient political salience. The defence of judicial independence, and the creation of robust institutional mechanisms for defending it, ultimately requires the goodwill of politicians.

Identifying optimal sampling designs for detecting population-level declines is critical for optimizing expenditures by research and monitoring programmes. The Tropical Ecology Assessment and Monitoring (TEAM) network is the most extensive tropical camera-trap monitoring programme, but the effectiveness of its sampling protocol has not been rigorously assessed. Here, we assess the power and sensitivity of the programme's camera-trap monitoring protocol for detecting occupancy changes in unmarked populations using the freely available application PowerSensor!. We found that the protocol is well suited to detect moderate (≥ 5%) population changes within 3–4 years for relatively common species that have medium to high detection probabilities (i.e. p > 0.2). The TEAM protocol cannot, however, detect typical changes in rare and evasive species, a category into which many tropical species and many species of conservation concern fall. Additional research is needed to build occupancy models for detecting change in rare and elusive species when individuals are unmarked.

This article offers an architectural blueprint for the study of economic connections between warfare in the early modern period and the long-term growth of Europe's competing national economies. It surveys and critically investigates the concepts derived mainly from economic theory and the statistical evidence accessible in primary and secondary sources for the investigation of this meta-problem for students of economic theory.

The 1995 Farm Bill debate proved different than many economists expected. It was overwhelmingly budget-driven. Few early concerns about the role of government, efficiency, equity, competitiveness, environment, rural development, and food were addressed. Economic analysis played a different role than anticipated. Models of who and how farm policy is made proved misleading; the debate circumvented the traditional process. Economic models were used more to perform budget accounting than substantive analysis. And their substantive analyses often failed to capture the attention of policymakers. Hence, while a reformist economist's dream, the bill leaves as many issues unanswered as it addresses.