The Impact of Attorneys on Judicial Decisions: Empirical Evidence from Civil Cases (original) (raw)
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The Impact of the Performance of Lawyers on Judicial Proceedings: A Literature Review
Ciências e Políticas Públicas, 2019
This article analyzed 32 empirical studies on the impact of the lawyer's performance on the outcome of the judicial decision. The findings were: the concentration of research in the United States (81.25 percent), civil jurisdiction (62.5 percent), the year of publication in general in the 2010 decade (56.25 percent) and the predominant use of the observational method (75 percent). The great methodological difficulty of these researches is to identify with precision if the impact in the judicial decision stems from the lawyer's performance or if it is only a consequence of the characteristics of the processes that are being judged, which can be achieved through experiments with research design with distribution cases to balance hidden variables.
O Impacto da Atuação dos Advogados em Processos Judiciais: Uma Revisão da Literatura
Ciências e Políticas Públicas / Public Sciences & Policies
This article analyzed 32 empirical studies on the impact of the lawyer's performance on the outcome of the judicial decision. The findings were: the concentration of research in the United States (81.25 percent), civil jurisdiction (62.5 percent), the year of publication in general in the 2010 decade (56.25 percent) and the predominant use of the observational method (75 percent). The great methodological difficulty of these researches is to identify with precision if the impact in the judicial decision stems from the lawyer's performance or if it is only a consequence of the characteristics of the processes that are being judged, which can be achieved through experiments with research design with distribution cases to balance hidden variables.
Judges in the Lab: No Precedent Effects, No Common/Civil Law Differences
Journal of Legal Analysis, 2020
In our lab, 299 real judges from seven major jurisdictions (Argentina, Brazil, China, France, Germany, India, and USA) spend up to fifty-five minutes to judge an international criminal appeals case and determine the appropriate prison sentence. The lab computer (i) logs their use of the documents (briefs, statement of facts, trial judgment, statute, precedent) and (ii) randomly assigns each judge (a) a horizontal precedent disfavoring, favoring, or strongly favoring defendant, (b) a sympathetic or an unsympathetic defendant, and (c) a short, medium, or long sentence anchor. Document use and written reasons differ between countries but not between common and civil law. Precedent effect is barely detectable and estimated to be less, and bounded to be not much greater than, that of legally irrelevant defendant attributes and sentence anchors.
Journal of Law and Society, 2020
We examine judges' role in civil litigation by studying empirically the relationship between judicial procedural involvement (JPI) and lawsuits' mode of disposition (MoD). Furthermore, we propose JPI as a metric for the allocation of judicial attention to litigants. Applying the framework to Israeli trial court data, we find that 60 per cent of cases included JPI (through hearings and rulings on motions) whereas 40 per cent involved only the court's institutional function. By juxtaposing JPI and MoD data, we shed light on the scope of judicial involvement in settlements, the ratio between judges' normative public-life function and their problem-solving function, and other pertinent questions. Since nowadays lawsuits are rarely adjudicated, trial rates are low, and litigants in person (pro se litigants) are common, we argue that access to justice should also be construed in terms of access to judicial attention throughout the proceeding, which is readily measurable through JPI.