The Duration of Judicial Deliberation: Evidence from Belgium

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

No 5947, CESifo Working Paper Series from CESifo

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: 2016
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (4)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.cesifo.org/DocDL/cesifo1_wp5947.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Journal Article: The Duration of Judicial Deliberation: Evidence from Belgium (2018)
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:ces:ceswps:_5947

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in CESifo Working Paper Series from CESifo Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Klaus Wohlrabe ().