Creating Quality Courts

Abstract

Numerous studies examine the importance of legal systems, yet there is little scholarship on how nations can improve their legal systems. Nations might try to invest more resources, including increasing overall budgets, increasing judicial salaries, or expanding the number of judges and/or courts. We examine data for a set of European nations, with a focus on the most effective way to use national resources to enhance judicial quality. We consider the effect of different uses of government resources and the effect of different judicial systems on measures of judicial quality, including independence, efficiency, the rule of law, and perceived impartiality.

Judicial Performance and its Determinants

“…Cross-country differences in trial length do not appear related to the amount of resources devoted to justice Consistent with previous research (Buscaglia and Dakolias, 1999, Rosales-López, 2008, Cross and Donelson, 2010, Voigt and El Bialy, 2012, there is no apparent link between the budget allocated to justice and the performance of the systems in the data assembled by the OECD. Figure 7 displays the amount of Note: The budget includes the amount of financial resources allocated to all courts, excluding resources for legal aid and public prosecution services.…”

A cross-country analysis of the impact of regulatory quality on commercial case disposition time

“…Furthermore, differences in disposition time can also be a consequence of the selection of judges. In civil law countries, judges are often career civil-servants, who are less innovative and interventionist (Hadfield 2008;Cross and Donelson 2010). Moreover, especially in commercial cases, civil law countries (and more specifically countries with a French legal system) often rely on lay judges (CEPEJ 2012).…”

Judicial Performance and Trust in Legal Systems: Findings from a Decade of Surveys in over 20 European Countries

“…Fortunately, the CEPEJ has systematically collected comparable objective data on judicial systems in Europe, particularly on judicial resources and pending and resolved cases in courts. The use of these data has become standard in the literature, including studies on the determinants of litigation (Buonanno and Galizzi, 2014; Bielen et al., 2018), aggregate judicial quality (Cross and Donelson, 2010) and judicial performance (Bielen, Marneffe, and Vereeck, 2015; Voigt and El‐Bialy, 2016), entrepreneurship (Ippoliti, Melcarne, and Ramello, 2015), and favorable economic outcomes (Lorenzani and Lucidi, 2014). In particular, CEPEJ collects two performance measures: Disposition time and Clearance rate .…”