IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/eee/irlaec/v68y2021ics0144818821000302.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

Judicial attitudes under shifting jurisprudence: Evidence from Brazil’s new drug law of 2006

Author

Listed:
  • Castro, Alexandre Samy de

Abstract

This paper attempts to quantify the response of different types of appellate judges to a major shift in criminal jurisprudence on drug offenses in Brazil, which, in 2010, revoked the prohibition of conversion of prison sentences in drug offenses. Appellate judges may react to criminal reform by changing their rates of judgements that are favorable to defendants and, depending on the judge type, responses run in different directions and with variable intensity. This study offers detailed estimates of such responses and interprets them in the light of the literature on the determinants of judicial decision-making, which resorts not only on legal factors but also on the ideology, personal attributes and strategic behavior of judges. According to the Brazilian constitution, 10% of the seats in appellate courts must be filled by formerly practicing lawyers and 10% by former prosecutors, both by executive appointment. The remaining 80% are reserved for career judges. In addition to these appointments, appellate panels also rely heavily on judges sitting by designation, who acted as rapporteurs, between 2009 and 2013, in as many as 14% of all criminal appeals in the state court of São Paulo, which is the subject of the analysis. A large dataset of criminal appeals related to drug offenses and the exogenous assignment of cases allow identifying the causal effects of career backgrounds on the response of appellate judges to the shift in drug jurisprudence. Estimates of the effect of judge types on appellate case outcomes, conditional on case characteristics and judging panel-specific effects, confirm that career judges are more likely to rule in favor of defendants, in line with the shift in jurisprudence. Former prosecutors and sitting judges seem to react against the shift, by increasing their rate of rulings against defendants. Former lawyers tend to exhibit mixed behavior, possibly resulting from a combination of liberal attitudes and strategic behavior, in deference to policy preferences of the executive branch.

Suggested Citation

  • Castro, Alexandre Samy de, 2021. "Judicial attitudes under shifting jurisprudence: Evidence from Brazil’s new drug law of 2006," International Review of Law and Economics, Elsevier, vol. 68(C).
    • Handle: RePEc:eee:irlaec:v:68:y:2021:i:c:s0144818821000302
    DOI: 10.1016/j.irle.2021.106006
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0144818821000302
    Download Restriction: Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only
    File URL: https://libkey.io/10.1016/j.irle.2021.106006?utm_source=ideas
    LibKey link: if access is restricted and if your library uses this service, LibKey will redirect you to where you can use your library subscription to access this item
    ---><---

    As the access to this document is restricted, you may want to search for a different version of it.

    References listed on IDEAS

    as
    1. Ashenfelter, Orley & Eisenberg, Theodore & Schwab, Stewart J, 1995. "Politics and the Judiciary: The Influence of Judicial Background on Case Outcomes," The Journal of Legal Studies, University of Chicago Press, vol. 24(2), pages 257-281, June.
    2. George L. Priest & Benjamin Klein, 1984. "The Selection of Disputes for Litigation," The Journal of Legal Studies, University of Chicago Press, vol. 13(1), pages 1-56, January.
    3. White, Halbert, 1982. "Maximum Likelihood Estimation of Misspecified Models," Econometrica, Econometric Society, vol. 50(1), pages 1-25, January.
    4. White, Halbert, 1980. "A Heteroskedasticity-Consistent Covariance Matrix Estimator and a Direct Test for Heteroskedasticity," Econometrica, Econometric Society, vol. 48(4), pages 817-838, May.
    5. Tate, C. Neal, 1981. "Personal Attribute Models of the Voting Behavior of U.S. Supreme Court Justices: Liberalism in Civil Liberties and Economics Decisions, 1946–1978," American Political Science Review, Cambridge University Press, vol. 75(2), pages 355-367, June.
    6. Freyens, Benoit Pierre & Gong, Xiaodong, 2017. "Judicial decision making under changing legal standards: The case of dismissal arbitration," Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization, Elsevier, vol. 133(C), pages 108-126.
    Full references (including those not matched with items on IDEAS)

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. repec:hal:journl:hal-03680153 is not listed on IDEAS
    2. Melcarne, Alessandro & Monnery, Benjamin & Wolff, François-Charles, 2022. "Prosecutors, judges and sentencing disparities: Evidence from traffic offenses in France," International Review of Law and Economics, Elsevier, vol. 71(C).

    Most related items

    These are the items that most often cite the same works as this one and are cited by the same works as this one.
    1. Freyens, Benoit Pierre & Gong, Xiaodong, 2020. "Judicial arbitration of unfair dismissal cases: The role of peer effects," International Review of Law and Economics, Elsevier, vol. 64(C).
    2. Gregory, Allan W. & McCurdy, Thomas H., 1986. "The unbiasedness hypothesis in the forward foreign exchange market: A specification analysis with application to France, Italy, Japan, the United Kingdom and West Germany," European Economic Review, Elsevier, vol. 30(2), pages 365-381, April.
    3. Reischmann, Markus, 2016. "Creative accounting and electoral motives: Evidence from OECD countries," Journal of Comparative Economics, Elsevier, vol. 44(2), pages 243-257.
    4. Towfiqul Islam Khan & Mashfique Ibne Akbar, 2015. "Illicit Financial Flow in view of Financing the Post-2015 Development Agenda," Southern Voice Occasional Paper 25, Southern Voice.
    5. Potrafke, Niklas, 2019. "Electoral cycles in perceived corruption: International empirical evidence," Journal of Comparative Economics, Elsevier, vol. 47(1), pages 215-224.
    6. Paresh Kumar Narayan & Russell Smyth, 2007. "What Explains Dissent on the High Court of Australia? An Empirical Assessment Using a Cointegration and Error Correction Approach," Journal of Empirical Legal Studies, John Wiley & Sons, vol. 4(2), pages 401-425, July.
    7. Chen, Daniel L. & Levonyan, Vardges & Yeh, Susan, 2016. "Policies Affect Preferences: Evidence from Random Variation in Abortion Jurisprudence," IAST Working Papers 16-58, Institute for Advanced Study in Toulouse (IAST).
    8. Joachim Zietz, 2006. "Detecting neglected parameter heterogeneity with Chow tests," Applied Economics Letters, Taylor & Francis Journals, vol. 13(6), pages 369-374.
    9. McDonald, John, 2009. "Using least squares and tobit in second stage DEA efficiency analyses," European Journal of Operational Research, Elsevier, vol. 197(2), pages 792-798, September.
    10. Olivier Rubel & Prasad A. Naik, 2017. "Robust Dynamic Estimation," Marketing Science, INFORMS, vol. 36(3), pages 453-467, May.
    11. Crespí-Cladera, Rafel & Pascual-Fuster, Bartolomé, 2014. "Does the independence of independent directors matter?," Journal of Corporate Finance, Elsevier, vol. 28(C), pages 116-134.
    12. Barron, Kai & Parry, Charles D.H. & Bradshaw, Debbie & Dorrington, Rob & Groenewald, Pam & Laubscher, Ria & Matzopoulos, Richard, 2022. "Alcohol, Violence and Injury-Induced Mortality: Evidence from a Modern-Day Prohibition," EconStor Open Access Articles and Book Chapters, ZBW - Leibniz Information Centre for Economics, issue Online Ea, pages 1-44.
    13. Christopher Winship & Larry Radbill, 1994. "Sampling Weights and Regression Analysis," Sociological Methods & Research, , vol. 23(2), pages 230-257, November.
    14. Hansen, Bruce E. & Lee, Seojeong, 2019. "Asymptotic theory for clustered samples," Journal of Econometrics, Elsevier, vol. 210(2), pages 268-290.
    15. Gouriéroux, Christian, 1994. "Modèles économétriques : utilisation et interprétation (les)," CEPREMAP Working Papers (Couverture Orange) 9423, CEPREMAP.
    16. White, Halbert & Pettenuzzo, Davide, 2014. "Granger causality, exogeneity, cointegration, and economic policy analysis," Journal of Econometrics, Elsevier, vol. 178(P2), pages 316-330.
    17. Michael R. Baye & Joshua D. Wright, 2011. "Is Antitrust Too Complicated for Generalist Judges? The Impact of Economic Complexity and Judicial Training on Appeals," Journal of Law and Economics, University of Chicago Press, vol. 54(1), pages 1-24.
    18. Domac, Ilker & Martinez Peria, Maria Soledad, 2003. "Banking crises and exchange rate regimes: is there a link?," Journal of International Economics, Elsevier, vol. 61(1), pages 41-72, October.
    19. Bekaert, Geert & Harvey, Campbell R., 1997. "Emerging equity market volatility," Journal of Financial Economics, Elsevier, vol. 43(1), pages 29-77, January.
    20. Richter, Martin & Sørensen, Carsten, 2002. "Stochastic Volatility and Seasonality in Commodity Futures and Options: The Case of Soybeans," Working Papers 2002-4, Copenhagen Business School, Department of Finance.

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:eee:irlaec:v:68:y:2021:i:c:s0144818821000302. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    If CitEc recognized a bibliographic reference but did not link an item in RePEc to it, you can help with this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Catherine Liu (email available below). General contact details of provider: http://www.elsevier.com/locate/irle .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.