Manna from Heaven for Judges: Judges’ Reaction to a Quasi‐Random Reduction in Caseload

• Date: 01 December 2020
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1111/jels.12265
• Published date: 01 December 2020
• Author: Keren Weinshall,Christoph Engel

Journal of Empirical Legal Studies

Volume 17, Issue 4, 722–751, December 2020

Manna from Heaven for Judges: Judges’

Reaction to a Quasi-Random Reduction in

Caseload

Christoph Engel*and Keren Weinshall

What is the impact of caseload on judicial decision making? Is increasing judicial staff

effective in improving judicial services? To address these questions, we exploit a natural,

near-randomized experiment in the Israeli judiciary. In 2012, six senior registrars were

appointed in two of the six magistrate’s court districts. The choice of districts was moti-

vated by reasons unrelated to judicial performance. In these two districts, the civil caseload

per judge was substantially reduced. We f‌ind that the reduction had a signif‌icant impact

on the process and outcomes of judicial decision making. Judges working in courts with

reduced caseload invested more resources in resolving each case. The effect is mostly to

the advantage of plaintiffs, who were more likely to win, recover a larger fraction of their

claims, and be reimbursed for litigation costs. We discuss the implications for judicial man-

agement and theories about judicial decision making.

I. Introduction

Judiciaries worldwide claim to be facing increasing caseloads, presumably leading to inac-

cessible and delayed justice, reduced quality of judgments, judicial burnout, declining

public conf‌idence in the courts, and the vanishing trial phenomenon.

The perceived “caseload crisis” is interpreted in very different ways though, which

we place on a spectrum between two distinct theoretical approaches: “judicial” versus

“managerial.” According to the judicial approach, the crisis is mostly attributable to socio-

*Address correspondence to Christoph Engel, Max Planck Institute for Research on Collective Goods, Kurt-

Schumacher-Straße 10, D 53113 Bonn, Germany; email: engel@coll.mpg.de. Weinshall is Edward S. Silver Chair in

Civil Procedure, Hebrew University, Jerusalem

Professor Weinshall’s research was supported by the Israel Science Foundation (Grant No. 1404/17). Helpf ul

comments by Jennifer Doleac, Stefanie Egidy, Jens Frankenreiter, Jacob Goldin, J. J. Prescott, Holger Spamann,

Eyal Zamir, and audiences at the Workshop for Empirical Study of Public Law & Human Rights in Jerusalem (June

2019), Workshop on Judicial Decision-Making at the IVR Congress in Lucerne (July 2019), and the Conference on

Empirical Legal Studies in Clermont (November 2019) are gratefully acknowledged.

©2020 The Authors. Journal of Empirical Legal Studies published by Cornell Law School and Wiley Periodicals LLC.

This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits use,

distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

722

legal developments that generate an increasing volume and complexity of cases, out-

pacing a smaller increase in the number of judges. This line of thought advocates raising

the supply side by appointing more judges, registrars, and judicial staff (Richman & Reyn-

olds 2012; Levy 2013; Adler 2014; Stras & Pettigrew 2010). On the other hand, the mana-

gerial approach claims that clogged courts are, to a large degree, the result of

mismanagement and ineff‌iciency, outdated legal procedures, and judicial passivity

(Castro & Guccio 2015; Dalton & Singer 2014; Mitsopoulos & Pelagidis 2010; Moffett

et al. 2016). In this interpretation, increasing courts’ budgets or appointing new judges is

not perceived as an effective remedy (Agrast et al. 2011; Beenstock & Haitovsky 2004;

Heaton & Helland 2011; Webber 2006).

The managerial approach corresponds with theories of judicial behavior that view

judges as individuals motivated in part by leisure preferences (Posner 1993). Thus, when

more judges are appointed to a court with a given caseload, the judges who maximize

personal utility are predicted to react by working less and taking more time for leisure.

On the other hand, the judicial approach asserts that judges are predominantly moti-

vated to do a good job (Engel & Zhurakhovska 2017). If so, when judges have lighter

caseloads they are expected to use the extra time to better resolve their remaining cases.

In this article, we study this question empirically: Is increasing judicial staff effective in

improving judicial services? Does it impact the substantive outcomes of decisions? To address

these questions, we exploit a natural, near-randomized experiment in the Israeli judiciary. In

2012, senior registrars were appointed for a pilot program to conduct evening hearings in

two of the six magistrate’s court districts. Assigning the registrars to two specif‌ic districts was

motivated by the location of the court buildings in the city, and entirely unrelated to case-

loads, work procedures, or judicial performance. These appointments constituted an increase

of around 15 percent in judicial staff devoted to civil litigation in the two treated districts and

to a decrease of an estimated 14 percent of the caseload for each civil judge active in these

courts. Other magistrate’s court districts did not experience changes in the number of judi-

cial staff or caseload during the period studied. We test a series of indicators for resource

investment, court performance, and outcomes of judicial decision making before and after

the exogenous shock on caseload, compared to those in untreated districts.

The analysis is based on an original dataset of 2,085 small claims, randomly sam-

pled from each of the six court districts, pre- and post-treatment. We chose to focus on

small claims because they offer several methodological advantages. Chief‌ly, small claims

are assigned in periodic rotations, with cases randomly distributed among judges and

senior registrars. Additionally, disputes are fairly homogeneous, involving small amounts,

mostly between private individual litigants, with no legal representation. The unre-

presented “one-shooter” “(Galanter 1974) petitioners in small claims are less likely to

react strategically by f‌iling more cases in the treated courts or reducing their claims to

qualify for small claim procedure (as supported by the data, showing no displacement

effects). The similarities between small claims further reduce concerns about

unobservable variables causing differences in decisions before and after treatment in

treated and untreated courts. As a further safeguard against potential imbalances in the

sample of cases, we employ coarsened exact matching(CEM). Results after matching are

consistent with results that use the raw data.

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