One judge to rule them all: Single‐member courts as an answer to delays in criminal trials

Konstantinos Kalliris and Theodore Alysandratos

Journal of Empirical Legal Studies, 2023, vol. 20, issue 1, 233-268

Abstract: This paper is a discussion of whether single‐member judicial panels are an effective way of accelerating the delivery of criminal justice. We use a reform which introduced single‐member courts in Greece, where delays in court proceedings are common according to the European Justice Scoreboard and the European Court of Human Rights. We use a novel dataset of 1463 drug trafficking cases tried between June 2012 and January 2014. As our measure of efficiency we use the time to issue a decision, and we find that single‐member panels are as efficient as three‐member ones. We take advantage of a feature of the reform to control for several confounding factors and support a causal interpretation of our findings. We complement our analysis with a survey of 142 judges to guide our interpretation of the results.

Date: 2023
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https://doi.org/10.1111/jels.12341

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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:wly:empleg:v:20:y:2023:i:1:p:233-268

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