The role of adjudication procedures in judicial timeliness: quasi-experimental evidence

Understanding the determinants of judicial performance is of the utmost importance to promote economic prosperity. The Italian judiciary is notoriously slow, with an estimated backlog of more than three million cases. We use a sample of 652,174 cases from one small claims court in Italy to limit geographical heterogeneity. Despite being generally overlooked by scholarly literature, small claims courts provide justice for a third of the overall civil litigation in Italy. We study the roles of different procedures in judicial timeliness. We exploit plausibly exogenous variation in the procedures governing how judges rule on small claims via a regression discontinuity approach. Our estimates reveal that when litigants are required to pay a fee to have their case heard, resolution takes about 5 months longer. We do not find conclusive evidence that when judges are able to rule without providing legal justification, decisions are actually made faster. We document the robustness of these results in light of both selection and observable strategic behavior on the part of litigants. We discuss how our results align with recent policy reforms in the realm of small claims, including methods to ease congestion in Italian courts and efforts to improve judicial performance more broadly.