Abstracts

Session I: Judicial Behavior

Title of the Presentation: Prosecution or Persecution? An Empirical Case Study from the Netherlands

Presenter: Samantha Bielen (University of Hasselt)

Co-author: Peter Grajzl (Washington Lee University)

Abstract

We examine the presence of ethnoreligious bias in prosecutorial decisions, an empirically understudied stage of the criminal justice process. To this end, we investigate the consequences of a 2004 murder of Theo van Gogh, a Dutch film director and producer known for his controversial stance toward the Islam. Following the release of a van Gogh-directed movie that critically portrayed violence against women in Islamic societies, van Gogh was murdered in Amsterdam by a Dutch Muslim of Moroccan descent. Exploiting the exogenous nature of the event and using a difference-in-difference approach, we examine whether the murder differentially impacted the prospects of prosecution of defendants of Muslim origin.

Session II: Judicial Selection

Title of the Presentation: Mixed Judicial Selection and Constitutional Review: Evidence from Spain

Presenter: Nuno Garoupa (George Mason University)

Co-authors: Marian Gili Saldaña (ESERP Business School), Fernando Gomez Pomar (Pompeu Fabra University)

Abstract

Recent evidence suggests that constitutional judges appointed by different institutions could have a distinct role when adjudicating. We use the particular case of the Spanish Constitutional Court to further investigate this matter. Constitutional judges in Spain have different professional backgrounds and are selected by four different institutions (executive, legislative, and judicial branches of government). We find some evidence that they differ in their patterns of invalidation of statutes and dissenting. However, the results also show that politicization does not seem to be shaped by professional backgrounds or appointing institutions.

Session III: Measuring Judicial Influence

Title of the Presentation: Advocates-General and the Work of the Court of Justice of the European Union: A Text-as-Data Analysis of the Influence of Advocate-General Opinions

Presenter: Kristen Renberg (Duke University)

Co-author: Michael Tolley (Northeastern University)

Abstract

The “reasoned submissions” or opinions of advocates-general may only be advisory, but they are followed very often by the judges on the Court of Justice of the European Union. Well known and easily documented is the fact that the Court reaches the same outcome as the advocates-general in the vast majority of the cases. Less well known and more difficult to assess is how much influence advocates-general exert beyond the outcome of the decision and whether some advocates-general are more influential than others on the Court’s reasoning and in the development of European law. In this paper, we use text-as-data analysis to measure the influence of advocate-general opinions on Court of Justice judgments. The availability of advocate-general opinions and Court of Justice judgments in digital format makes it possible to quantify the relationships between the two. Our approach allows us to ask and answer several important political and legal questions about the work of the Court of Justice. To what extent do advocates-general influence Court of Justice judgments beyond the mere outcome of the case? Who have been the most (and least) influential advocates-general in this regard? Were advocate-general opinions more or less influential after the reforms to the Court of Justice in 2003 (increase in the number of judges and termination of the requirement that advocate-general opinions be prepared in all cases)? Are there some characteristics of the advocates-general and the judges that may indicate when there is likely to be more direct borrowing from the advocate-general’s opinions? Our findings provide new empirical evidence of the influence advocates-general have on Court of Justice decision-making and, in turn, the development of European law.

Session IV: Courts

Title of the Presentation: The Role of Legal Justification in Judicial Performance: Quasi-Experimental Evidence

Presenter: Alessandro Melcarne (University of Paris - Nanterre)

Co-authors: Giovanni Battista Ramello (University of Piemonte Orientale), Paige Marta Skiba (Vanderbilt University)

Abstract

The Italian judicial system is notoriously slow, with an estimated backlog of 5 million cases. We use a sample of 903,660 court cases in Turin to study the role that various adjudication procedures play in judicial delay. We exploit plausibly exogenous variation in the procedures governing how judges rule on small claims and implement a quasi-experimental approach to estimate the causal effect of less restrictive procedures on judicial delay. For any claim valued below e1,100, judges do not need to provide formal legal justification for their decisions. Judges can rule based on “equità”, i.e., fairness, intuition or common-sense grounds. For cases valued above this threshold, judges do not have such flexibility. Our regression discontinuity estimates, which exploit the variation in these adjudication procedures just above and just below this threshold, reveal that when judges are able to rule without providing legal justification, decisions are made nearly six months faster. We discuss the policy implications in the realm of small claims including methods to ease congestion in Italian courts and efforts to improve judicial performance more broadly.

Session V: Methods of Causal Inference

Title of the Presentation: Estimating the Effects of Judicial Language with Deep Instrumental Variables

Presenter: Elliot Ash (ETH Zürich)

Co-author: Philipp Nikolaus (ETH Zürich)

Abstract

This paper generalizes high-dimensional instrumental variables methods to estimate causal effects of text. In our application, the text treatments are judicial opinions in U.S. Circuit Courts, where we would like to estimate the effect of language/reasoning choices on a case’s common-law impact (as measured by forward citations). The instruments are proxies for the opinion-writing habits of judges, who are randomly assigned to cases. Building on recently developed ”deep instrumental variables” (”Deep IV”) methods, our text-based IV estimator allows for high-dimensional real-valued instruments and for high-dimensional real-valued endogenous regressors. The analysis produces a number of intuitive results: procedural or technical arguments tend to reduce citations, while careful and critical legal reasoning tends to increase citations.

Session VI: Judicial Efficiency

Title of the Presentation: Does Judicial Efficiency Matter for Economic Specialization? Province-Level Evidence from Spain

Presenter: Juan S. Mora-Sanguinetti (Bank of Spain)

Co-author: Rok Spruk

Abstract

We exploit historical differences in foral law to consistently estimate the contribution of the quality of enforcement institutions to economic specialization across Spanish provinces in the period 1999-2014. The distribution of economic activity in Spain as of today shows a strong pattern of geographical specialization. Regions less specialized in manufacturing (industry) and oriented to services sectors (Andalusia, Extremadura) in the south are compared with industrialized/manufacturing regions in the north such as the Basque Country, Navarre or Aragon. We construct province-level congestion rates across three different jurisdictions (civil, labor and administrative) from real judicial data measuring the performance of the Spanish judicial system over time, and estimate the effect of judicial efficacy on the share of manufacturing and services in the total output. Using a variety of estimation techniques, the evidence unveils strong and persistent effects of judicial efficacy on province-level economic specialization with notable distributional differences. The provinces with a historical experience of foral law are significantly more likely to have more efficient enforcement institutions at the present day. In turn, greater judicial efficacy facilitates specialization in high-productivity manufacturing while greater judicial inefficacy encourages service-intensive specialization. The effect of judicial efficacy on economic specialization does not depend on confounders, holds across a number of specification checks and appears to be causal. Lastly, the three jurisdictions seem relevant to explain specialization, although the administrative jurisdiction appears to have a more pronounced impact than labor or civil jurisdictions.