Let's now shift gear and look at a very different type of legal research. It asks the question; to what extent do court rulings influence public opinion? Do court decisions actually shift the way we think about complex hot-button social issues?

Malcolm Langford is an Australian who now works in Norway. He's an associate professor of law at the University of Oslo. His research involved focus groups of 3,000 Norwegians.

Malcolm Langford: What we used was the Norwegian citizen panel, and we had groups of around 300 each that got different information. And the first study that I conducted looked at the criminalisation of prostitution in Norway. And it's a piece of legislation in 2009 which made it illegal to purchase sexual services. There was slight majority support for that legislation at the time and it has sort of grown up to around 65% support over the last five or six years.

At the same time there was a very interesting judgement from the Canadian Supreme Court which found that a roughly similar piece of legislation was unconstitutional because it didn't respect the personal security rights of sex workers. When you have criminalisation of sex work you may take more risks as a sex worker, you may be more likely to inform police of dangers because you're worried about being arrested. And so on these grounds they actually struck down a relatively similar piece of legislation.

So what I wanted to find out was what happens when these different groups get different information about courts and their judgements on criminalisation of prostitution. So the first group just got the reason, if we can call it that, and just said the first group got a bit of information; people say that personal security rights of sex workers are threatened when sex work is criminalised. And then we looked at how people responded and the intensity of their support for the criminalisation law.

The next group then just got the information that the European Court of Human Rights could strike down this legislation. Then we looked at what the spectrum of views were. Then we moved on and we had the European Court of Human Rights could strike down this legislation because it violates the personal security rights of sex workers. And then we repeated the same for the Norwegian Supreme Court, and in fact for the Canadian Supreme Court to see what were the impacts on Norwegian citizen views.

Damien Carrick: One group were told that, look, a similar legislation had been struck down in Canada for this very reason.

Malcolm Langford: Absolutely.

Damien Carrick: So what did you find?

Malcolm Langford: Surprisingly all of those three courts had the same effect on public opinion. There was around a 10% to 20% variation across the spectrum, but in all of those cases, support for the law fell from around 65% to just under 50%, regardless of whether it was the Norwegian Supreme Court, the European Court of Human Rights, or the Canadian Supreme Court. However, if the groups just got information about the rights of sex workers or just got information about a court could strike it down, then there was no statistically significant difference.

Damien Carrick: So what does your research tell us? It tells us that the public are receptive and influenced by decisions of courts that they respect, is that what you're telling me?

Malcolm Langford: What this research shows is that, at least in this case in Norway, is that they can be influenced, or at least some voters can be influenced. And it's interesting in this case that you actually lose majority support for a particular piece of legislation.

Damien Carrick: Is it possible that the results in Norway would be different from the results in other countries? I'm wondering, Norwegians, do they perhaps put more faith in judges and legal decisions than citizens of other countries? I'm thinking perhaps Americans who might regard the Supreme Court as a more inherently politicised beast than, say, equivalents in northern Europe.

Malcolm Langford: Absolutely, but I'd probably disagree with the example you use. So Norwegians generally have a high trust in their institutions, that's one of the features of Nordic countries, and I think that's why their level of support is pretty much consistent across the three very different types of courts. If you go across to Britain then I don't think one would get the same results, and that's something to be tested. What we see though from another study is that the British have a much lower view, for example, of the European Court of Human Rights compared to their own court. So we wouldn't expect the same sort of shifts in public opinion in Britain, in fact we might expect negative effects if the European Court of Human Rights intervenes on a political hot-button issue.

The interesting thing in the US is that the US Supreme Court consistently does better than other political institutions. You probably know, Congress only has a 10% favourability rating amongst the entire public of the US, whereas the Supreme Court gets up into the 50s and 60s in terms of its support. So even though it's a very politicised institution, it is generally well respected by the public. In fact it's only Afro-Americans which have had declining respect for the US Supreme Court.

But I think if we then go to other places in the world, if we go to Kenya or to China or to Thailand, you're not going to find necessarily the same levels of respect if there is distrust generally in the courts.

Damien Carrick: Coming back to the hot-button social issues, what do you think the courts can learn from this kind of research, how could they take it on board?

Malcolm Langford: I think courts can learn a number of things from this research. The first is that they do have what we might call some symbolic power or attitudinal power which they can use in certain cases. One might then think consequentially about how that is best used, and a good example comes from the Brown versus Board of Education decision of the US Supreme Court in 1954. And what Chief Justice Warren did was…

Damien Carrick: And that's a civil rights case?

Malcolm Langford: It's a civil rights case. It basically found that segregation of schooling between white and Afro-American citizens was unconstitutional, it violated the right to equal treatment. What Chief Justice Warren did was first he worked to get a consensus judgement. And his work in that direction has been proved to be quite wise in subsequent research, which shows that if people learn of a dissenting decision, they are less likely to change their mind.

The second thing that he did was work to get a comprehensible judgement that the public could understand, and ensure that the New York Times published the judgement in full. And so what he was trying to do in a sense was basically go over the heads of the state leaders, particularly in the South, and direct to the American public, because they realised that to get compliance with the decision they had to actually change public opinion on this issue. So I think there's some lessons there, both historically and from the quantitative research, showing that if courts look at the different factors that influence the public response to their judgement, they may be able to have a positive role in this regard.

Damien Carrick: Associate Professor Malcolm Langford from the University of Oslo.

That's the Law Report for this week. Thanks to producer Anita Barraud and technical producer Nick Mierisch. I'm Damien Carrick, talk to you next week with more law.