Court Productivity and Trade-off between Judicial Speed and Verdict Length: Evidence from the Court of Justice of the European Union}

Abstract

Drawing on neoclassical consumer choice theory, we design a model to study court performance in which a judge is facing a trade-off between judicial speed (time to decision) and verdict length (number of words) given a resource constraint. The model has two main implications. First, the trade-off can be interpreted as the rate of technical transformation that is taken as a measure of court productivity. A low transformation rate from time to verdict implies poor judge or court productivity. We study the evolution of the rate using data of the Court of Justice of the European Union from 1959 to 2017, and suggest that the estimate rate is a good measure of the court performance and indicates a need for court reform. Second, the model predicts that growing backlog of cases reduces either speed, length, or both, and the rise in resources improves either one or both of them. To deal with the simultaneous determination of speed, length, backlog and resources, we employ panel vector autoregression to allow court performance (speed and length), backlog and expenditure to be endogenously determined. We find that backlog impacts judicial speed negatively while expenditure has a positive impact on verdict length in the medium to long run.