The Role of Precedents on Court Delay - Evidence from a civil law country

Michael Berlemann () and Robin Christmann

MPRA Paper from University Library of Munich, Germany

Abstract: Court delay frustrates economic behavior. Surprisingly, the impact of a coherent jurisdiction for the timely resolution of legal disputes has so far received little attention in civil law countries. Consequently, this paper examines the nexus between court delay and the availability of legal precedents. We model litigation as a two-stage rent seeking game, and find that precedents curb strategic behavior. Thus, the excessive use of party resources in litigation, such as time, is reduced if a precedent is applicable. Using judge-level data of a German trial court, we provide first empirical evidence on the role of precedents for case disposition time and the probability of reversal in a civil law country. Our results show that the availability of precedents significantly contributes to a reduction in delay, and also decreases the probability of reversal. Interestingly, we find no such influence for the citation of legal literature in verdicts.

Keywords: judicial precedent; legal citation; jurisprudence constante; case resolution (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: K40 K41 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2017-02-01
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-law
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
https://mpra.ub.uni-muenchen.de/80057/1/MPRA_paper_80057.pdf original version (application/pdf)

Related works:
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:pra:mprapa:80057

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in MPRA Paper from University Library of Munich, Germany Ludwigstraße 33, D-80539 Munich, Germany. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Joachim Winter ().