Is justice delayed justice denied? An empirical approach

Abstract

Improving judicial performance in order to enhance the business environment has been a policy goal for many governments in the last decades. Following the suggestions of several international organizations, most countries have tried to speed up their case resolution systems by streamlining judicial procedure. However, not as much attention has been devoted to test the potential drawbacks of similar reforms in terms of supplying a quicker but yet qualitatively inferior justice, thus contradicting the well-known legal maxim justice delayed is justice denied. The present work wishes to contribute to the empirical literature on the topic by proposing two alternative ways to further disentangle the relationship between judicial performance and judicial quality. Exploiting a dataset of 171 countries for the 2003–2016 time period, we find statistically significant evidence of a strong and negative relationship between courts’ delay and countries’ quality of the justice. While the intrinsic limits of this kind of institutional empirical analysis suggest caution when interpreting our estimates as proof of causality, we present more robust evidence suggesting that countries characterized by faster judiciaries seem to be equally not affected by a deterioration of the quality of justice, thus confirming the aforementioned maxim, at least descriptively.