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Can (and Should) Judges Be Shamed? Evidence from the 'Six-Month List'

Year: 2018
Type: preprint
Abstract: Recent court reform efforts in the United States have focused on speeding up what is perceived to be a slow and burdensome federal civil justice system. But how is speed best achieved, and at what cost to other goals of the civil justice system? I study a Congressionally-enacted reform known as the list, which uses social pressure to incentivize federal judges to decide cases more quickly. After constructing an original dataset of nearly 500,000 federal district court motions -- representing the approximate universe of summary judgment motions in federal civil cases for the period 2004-2014 -- I exploit quasi-random variation in exposure to the six-month list in order to answer two related questions. First, does the six-month list accomplish its ostensible goal of promoting speedier adjudications? And second, how does the six-month list affect the quality of civil adjudications? Preliminary results indicate that the six-month list does indeed improve speed; the summary judgment motions that are most exposed to the six-month list are resolved almost a full month (15%) faster than those that are least exposed, and overall case durations are similarly impacted. I also find considerable heterogeneity across judges, with judges who are young, non-white, or female being among the most responsive to the incentives created by the six-month list. Speedier adjudications notwithstanding, I find only mixed evidence of effects on the quality of adjudications. My results suggest that -- at least among federal judges -- social pressure can be an effective substitute for monetary incentives. I interpret these results as consistent with a model of judicial behavior that combines elements of career concerns, procrastination, and multitasking.
Language: English
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W2993507106
Cites: 28
Cited by: 3
Related to: 10