An emerging theme in work on justice reform is the need for hard data on court performance and related issues. Who uses the courts? For what purposes? With what results? How long do cases take? The material on this page provides examples of how researchers in both the developed and developing world have gone about answering such questions.
The Need for Empirical Research Before Initiating Justice Reform One lesson from U.S. judicial reform efforts is the importance of grounding reform on a solid empirical base. In this paper Deborah Hensler, Stanford Law Professor and former director of the Rand Institute for Civil Justice, describes what can happen when a reform proceeds without such a base. The examples discussed are the introduction of case management into U.S. courts and the adoption of alternative dispute resolution programs. 
Understanding When and How Citizens Use the Courts Judicial reform requires a solid understanding of when citizens use the courts and what they use them for. To inform the debate on civil justice reform and access to justice in England and Wales, a research team led by Professor Hazel Genn interviewed 1134 individuals about what they had done when faced with a "justiciable problem," a problem such as injury in automobile accident, purchase of a defective product, or other event for which the legal system provided a remedy. The attached chart shows the different paths citizens chose. It is taken from Paths to Justice: What People Do and Think About Going to Law (Oxford: Hart Publishing, 1999), which describes how the survey was taken and the results it yielded.
Uses of Empirical Research In Refocusing Judicial Reforms: Lessons From Five Countries Following the democratic opening of the 1980s, Latin Americans took a renewed interest in their court systems and initiated two decades of concerted efforts to improve their performance. This paper by Linn Hammergren assesses the characteristics of these efforts and the outcomes of empirical research.
Reforming Courts: The Role of Empirical Research In partnership with local researchers, the World Bank analyzed a random sample of cases filed in the first instance courts of Mexican and Argentina. The resulting studies revealed that much of what even experts "know" about the operation of Latin American justice systems is incorrect. The findings of each study and the implications for judicial reform are reviewed.
Evaluating the Reasons for Court Delay The time required to resolve civil lawsuits in the district courts of the Indian state of Uttar Pradesh has increased dramatically in recent years. Two popular explanations for the increase in delays are a shortage of judges and a culture of litigiousness. This excerpt from a book on the Uttar Pradesh courts, reprinted with the permission of the Association for Asian Studies, shows that these explanations do not survive a rigorous evaluation. More generally, it illustrates the value of empirical data in diagnosing court performance.
Legal Structure and Judicial Efficiency This paper uses information gathered from a survey of lawyers in 109 countries to analyze the procedures applicable to hypothetical cases. One where a residential tenant is resisting eviction and a second where a creditor is seeking to collect on a check that has been returned for insufficient funds. In both cases, it is assumed that the opposing party has no valid defense. The authors find that the regulation of dispute resolution is greater in civil than common law countries and that this regulation results in lengthier and more costly proceedings. Suggestions for beneficial reforms are included.
Measuring the Pace of Civil Litigation in American Trial Courts This analysis of case level data from U.S. trial courts uses survival analysis, a statistical technique borrowed from the biological sciences, to compare the rate at which courts terminate their cases. The study identifies the pace of litigation for different types of cases and different courts and which stages of the litigation process contributes most to “delay.” The sample analyzed consists of 300 cases from each of five federal judicial districts with half drawn from the federal court and half from the state court in the district. The sampling method is discussed as well as the practical problems encountered in drawing the sample and coding the entries. Different theories of delay are reviewed, and the concept of delay is subjected to a searching and critical analysis. The authors concludes that use of the term "delay" in discussing case processing times for civil litigation is ambiguous and can ultimately be misleading. Among the findings of the study are that “local legal culture” is not a useful concept for accounting for differences in case termination times, that the relationship of time to case outcomes is more complex than previous research had posited, and that pleading reforms are unlikely to systematically reduce case processing times. This article originally appeared in Judicature, the magazine of the American Judicature Society and is posted here by permission.
Tools for Conducting a Case Level Analysis of Court Data Many judicial reform projects begin with a case level analysis of the court system. A sample of closed cases is chosen, and for each case data on the identify of the parties, the type of case, the amount in issue, the time to disposition, and other key information is extracted from the case file. The data is first entered by hand onto coding forms and then put into machine readable form where it can be subjected to various types of statistical analysis. Attached are examples of different coding forms used to collect case level data along with the instructions provided to those doing the coding. Coding Instructions (Philippines) Coding Form (Philippines) Coding Form with Instructions (Dominican Republic, labor courts) in Spanish Coding Form with Instructions (Dominican Republic, civil courts) in Spanish Data Collection Form, (Appendix 2 to Toronto Case Management Study)
An Empirical Analysis of Civil Case Disposition Time This Article addresses the need to understand better the U.S. justice system by exploring possible determinants of disposition time for civil cases that reach a jury trial. This study uses one year of civil jury case outcomes from 45 of the nation's 75 most populous counties and identifies locale as one important variable, along with certain case types, results, and characteristics. An empirically moored understanding of the causes of case disposition time will assist public policy and reform efforts that seek to make civil justice speedier and, as a consequence, more inexpensive and just. Findings from this study call into question the efficacy of recent reform efforts that focus on variables not found to influence civil case disposition time and ignore other variables that exert systemic influence. The article is reprinted with the permission of the Case Western Law Review. pages 1-10 [10.4M] pages 11-19 [9.51M])
Empirical Research and Justice Reform One lesson from U.S. judicial reform efforts is the importance of grounding reform on a solid empirical base. In this paper Deborah Hensler, Stanford Law Professor and former director of the Rand Institute for Civil Justice, describes what can happen when a reform proceeds without such a base. The examples discussed are the introduction of case management in US courts and the adoption of alternative dispute resolution programs.
Opinion Surveys
Surveying Court Users One way to gauge the performance of courts is to survey "users", that is, people with recent, immediate experience as a claimant, defendants, witness, or other participant in a judicial proceeding. Professor Bert Kritzer and colleagues with the Wisconsin court system devised two questionnaires to determine what court users thought of first instance courts in Wisconsin. One was administered to those leaving the court house, an exit survey. The second was mailed to those who had used the courts in the past 60 days.
A Study of Case Management in Toronto, 1973-1994 The absence of empirical information about the processing of cases through courts often forces reformers to base their actions on anecdote rather than fact. Often the intuitive feelings judicial professionals share about basic information such as the average length of cases or the extent of case backlogs is incorrect or skewed, making empirical data collection even more important. This survey provides an example of a thorough study of a single court's case load and processing times. It catalogues the changes in civil litigation patterns in Toronto over a twenty year period, noting salient changes and trends. Due to the length of the study, it has been broken into parts for easier downloading. Introduction, Table of Contents, and sections 1.0 through 5.0 Sections 6.0 through 9.0 and Conclusion Appendix 1, Methodology Appendix 2, Data Collection Form Appendix 3, Landlord and Tenant Study Appendix 4, List of Tables and Figures back to top
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