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Time efficiency as a measure of court performance: evidence from the Court of Justice of the European Union

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Abstract

This work proposes an alternative measure of court performance, namely, time efficiency, which is equal to the length of a verdict divided by the time needed to resolve the case. Using the data of resolved judgments of the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU) from 1954 to 2017, we show that, first, backlog causes time efficiency to fall using a vector autoregression model (VAR), and, second, the lowest value of time efficiency coincides with the establishment of the General Court in 1989. We argue with evidence that the improvement of time efficiency since 1989 was a result of the reform of the CJEU.

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Notes

  1. The core institutions of the European Coal and Steel Community—the High Authority (nowadays the Commission), the Council (composed of the Member States) and the Assembly (nowadays the European Parliament) began operation during the autumn of 1952, after the establishing Treaty of Paris entered into force on 23 July 1952.

  2. See Articles 33 and 37 of the Treaty establishing the European Coal and Steel Community.

  3. French influence is felt more generally at the Court, seeing as it is also its main working language.

  4. See Article 263 of the Treaty on the Functioning of the European Union (TFEU).

  5. A rudimentary and vague allusion to a similar procedure was already included in Article 41 of the Treaty establishing the European Coal and Steel Community.

  6. Originally Article 88 of the ECSC Treaty; now Article 258 TFEU. The Treaty of Rome (Article 169) adjusted this procedure in 1958 by shifting the burden of initiating a court case from the Member State on the Commission and by allocating the power to impose financial penalties to the Court.

  7. Underlining the practical relevance of our theoretical lens, some national judges’ preferences over the speed-length continuum were later revealed when they were quoted as willing to accept slower replies from the Court of Justice as long as a high level of quality was maintained (Turner & Muñoz, 1999, p. 91).

  8. Interestingly, a staff tribunal was deemed desirable by the Council as early as 1974 (Schermers, 1988, p. 542).

  9. The raw information is available on the websites of the CJEU and the EU’s law portal: https://curia.europa.eu and https://eur-lex.europa.eu. The data can be obtained through a dedicated R package (Ovádek, 2021).

  10. Apart from removing some types of decisions, we also drop a small number of cases for which we are unable to obtain the corresponding text. Even if we can impute the length of the verdict and also the date of submission, we decide to remove them from the sample as we will rely on the text to measure the case complexity that may drive the speed and the length of the verdict together.

  11. The computation of backlog considers also cases without texts.

  12. The regression output is skipped. R-squared = 0.8979; number of observations = 11,549.

  13. Results using average length per day are shown in the Appendix for comparison. We keep it at level even the test cannot reject that it is a unit-root process for the purpose of a consistent comparison.

  14. The BIC of VAR(2) is 0.9925 and that of VAR(3) is 1.1428.

  15. Topic classification is obtained through a NLP topic modelling that assumes 10 distinctive topics. As the topics are not closely to the main theme of this work, we skip the explanation and the results of the topic classification.

  16. Their correlation is 0.7043.

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Funding

The authors gratefully acknowledge financial support from European Research Council Grant No. 638154 (EUTHORITY).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Faculty of Law, KU Leuven, Leuven, Belgium

    Timothy Yu-Cheong Yeung & Nicolas Lampach

  2. Center for European Policy Studies, Brussels, Belgium

    Timothy Yu-Cheong Yeung

  3. Faculty of Political Science, University of Gothenburg, Gothenburg, Sweden

    Michal Ovádek

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  1. Timothy Yu-Cheong Yeung
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  2. Michal Ovádek
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Correspondence to Timothy Yu-Cheong Yeung.

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Appendix

Appendix

1.1 AR(1) and VAR(1) using length per day as the dependent variable

The main text provides the AR(1) results using the estimated time efficient coefficients obtained from a case-level regression. The case-level regression captures the heterogeneity of cases within a year and thus produces a more precise correlation coefficients between length and time. However, it is not incorrect to simply take average length per day as a measure of time efficiency, which is handy and always observable in any courts given that the texts of judgements are publicly available.Footnote 16 We provide the AR(1) and VAR(1) results using average length per day as the dependent variable for comparison.

Tables 5, 6

Table 5 AR(1) using length per day as the dependent variable
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Table 6 VAR(1) using length per day
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Figures 

Fig. 9
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Orthogonalized Impulse-response Functions (order: backlog, resources, time efficiency)

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9,

Fig. 10
figure 10

Cumulative Orthogonalized impulse-response Fucntions

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10

The impulse-response functions show a clearer picture: backlog has a negative impact on average length per day. On the other hand, resources significantly impact average length per day. This result is not found in the analysis using the estimated time efficiency.

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Yeung, T.YC., Ovádek, M. & Lampach, N. Time efficiency as a measure of court performance: evidence from the Court of Justice of the European Union. Eur J Law Econ 53, 209–234 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10657-021-09722-5

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