The Duration of Judicial Deliberation: Evidence from Belgium

Samantha Bielen, Wim Marneffe, Peter Grajzl and Valentina Dimitrova-Grajzl

Journal of Institutional and Theoretical Economics (JITE), 2018, vol. 174, issue 2, 303-333

Abstract: We utilize case-level data from a large Belgian court to study a policy-relevant but thus far empirically unexplored aspect of judicial behavior: the time that a judge takes to deliberate on a case before rendering a verdict. Exploiting the de facto random administrative assignment of filed cases among the serving judges and using survival-analysis methods, we find that the duration of judicial deliberation varies not only with measures of case complexity, but also with judge and disputing-party characteristics. We further find evidence consistent with the hypothesis that longer judicial deliberation improves the quality of judicial decisions.

Keywords: judicial deliberation; case-level data; survival analysis; speed-quality tradeoff; Belgium (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: K40 K41 K49 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2018
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Citations: View citations in EconPapers (4)

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Working Paper: The Duration of Judicial Deliberation: Evidence from Belgium (2016)
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DOI: 10.1628/093245617X14926792029174

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