The (Economic) Effects of Lay Participation in Courts - A Cross-Country Analysis
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Philipps-Universität Marburg
Abstract
Legal philosophers like Montesquieu, Hegel and Tocqueville have argued
that lay participation in judicial decision-making would have benefits
reaching far beyond the realm of the legal system narrowly understood.
From an economic point of view, lay participation in judicial decisionmaking
can be interpreted as a renunciation of an additional division of
labor, which is expected to cause foregone benefits in terms of the costs as
well as the quality of judicial decision-making. In order to be justified,
these foregone benefits need to be overcompensated by other – actually
realized – benefits of at least the same magnitude. This paper discusses
pros and cons of lay participation, presents a new database and tests
some of the theoretically derived hypotheses empirically. The effects of lay
participation on the judicial system, a number of governance variables but
also on economic performance indicators are rather modest. A proxy
representing historic experiences with any kind of lay participation is the
single most robust variable.
Keywords
Judicial Decision-Making, Trial by Jury, Jurors, Quality, Lay Assessors, Economic Effects of Legal Systems, Constitutional Economics, Civil Society