This article studies whether fee-shifting rules can affect plaintiffs’ win rates. Beyond theoretical modeling, this study goes a step further and provides empirical evidence on this issue, thanks to the study of a real change in Spanish legislation. Spain applied the so-called English rule in 2011 in the administrative jurisdiction. This study explores whether plaintiffs were more or less successful when litigating against public administrations since then. After controlling for several other factors, it is shown that the new rule considerably increased plaintiffs’ win rate (while also reducing litigation). The paper also presents a theoretical model explaining that the English rule can increase the prevalence of judgments in favor of plaintiffs through two channels: the selection of cases brought before the courts by interested parties and the level of deference paid by courts to the decisions under review.

本文研究了费用转移规则是否会影响原告的胜诉率。除了对理论建模的研究之外，由于对西班牙立法的真正变化进行了研究，因此这项研究更进一步，并提供了有关该问题的经验证据。西班牙于2011年在行政管辖区采用了所谓的英国规则。此研究探讨了从那时起，在对公共行政部门提起诉讼时，原告是否成功或多或少地取得了成功。在控制了其他几个因素之后，事实表明，新规则大大提高了原告的胜率（同时也减少了诉讼）。本文还提供了一种理论模型，该模型解释了英语规则可以通过两个渠道来提高有利于原告的判决的普遍性：