We provide empirical insight into the consequences of the Covid19 pandemic for the administration of justice. Drawing on a comprehensive monthly panel of Brazilian labor courts and using a difference-in-difference approach, we show that the pandemic has had a large and persistent deleterious effect on adjudicatory efficacy, leading to a massive decrease in the clearance rate and an increase in court backlogs. The pandemic has affected how courts dispose adjudication cases, expectedly causing a plummeting in the share of disputes resolved via trial hearings and, less predictably, exerting a temporally non-linear effect on the share of in-court settlements. Notably, we find no evidence of an effect of the pandemic on efficacy in enforcement. Although the pandemic led to an increase in the share of new filings requiring enforcement, any effect on the relative use of enforcement to execute court-ordered payments has been intermittent and temporary. The intensity of the pandemic has been an important moderating factor.

我们提供了关于 Covid19 大流行对司法行政的影响的实证见解。借鉴巴西劳动法庭的综合月度小组并使用差异法，我们表明大流行对裁决效力产生了巨大而持久的有害影响，导致清关率大幅下降，并增加了法庭积压。大流行影响了法院处理裁决案件的方式，预计会导致通过审判听证会解决的争议份额直线下降，并且更难以预测的是，对庭内和解的份额产生时间上的非线性影响。值得注意的是，我们没有发现大流行对执法效率产生影响的证据。尽管大流行导致需要执行的新申请的比例增加，对相对使用强制执行来执行法院命令的付款的任何影响都是断断续续的和暂时的。大流行的强度一直是一个重要的调节因素。