IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/isa/wpaper/85.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

The Rule Incentives that Rule Civil Justice

Author

Listed:
  • Daniela Marchesi

    (ISAE - Institute for Studies and Economic Analyses)

Abstract

The excessive length of civil judicial proceedings may be understood being the consequence of a disequilibrium between demand and supply of justice. A comparison between EU countries and a statistical and analytical investigation demonstrates that the problems do not rest in insufficient supply – which has been the general opinion – but in pathological demand for civil justice. Opportunistic behaviour incentivized by the procedural rules and by the excessive length of trials is at the root of such demand. Therefore changing the formula which determines lawyer’s fees should be the first reform introduced.

Suggested Citation

  • Daniela Marchesi, 2007. "The Rule Incentives that Rule Civil Justice," ISAE Working Papers 85, ISTAT - Italian National Institute of Statistics - (Rome, ITALY).
    • Handle: RePEc:isa:wpaper:85
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://lipari.istat.it/digibib/Working_Papers/WP_85_2007_Marchesi.pdf
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    References listed on IDEAS

    as
    1. Hause, John C, 1989. "Indemnity, Settlement, and Litigation, or I'll Be Suing You," The Journal of Legal Studies, University of Chicago Press, vol. 18(1), pages 157-179, January.
    2. Bebchuk, Lucian Arye & Chang, Howard F, 1996. "An Analysis of Fee Shifting Based on the Margin of Victory: On Frivolous Suits, Meritorious Suits, and the Role of Rule 11," The Journal of Legal Studies, University of Chicago Press, vol. 25(2), pages 371-403, June.
    3. Hughes, James W & Snyder, Edward A, 1995. "Litigation and Settlement under the English and American Rules: Theory and Evidence," Journal of Law and Economics, University of Chicago Press, vol. 38(1), pages 225-250, April.
    4. Snyder, Edward A & Hughes, James W, 1990. "The English Rule for Allocating Legal Costs: Evidence Confronts Theory," The Journal of Law, Economics, and Organization, Oxford University Press, vol. 6(2), pages 345-380, Fall.
    5. Cohen, Mark A., 1992. "The motives of judges: Empirical evidence from antitrust sentencing," International Review of Law and Economics, Elsevier, vol. 12(1), pages 13-30, March.
    6. Rosenberg, D. & Shavell, S., 1985. "A model in which suits are brought for their nuisance value," International Review of Law and Economics, Elsevier, vol. 5(1), pages 3-13, June.
    7. Steven Shavell, 1981. "Suit and Settlement vs. Trial: A Theoretical Analysis under Alternative Methods for the Allocation of Legal Costs," NBER Working Papers 0662, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.
    8. Beckner, Clinton III & Katz, Avery, 1995. "The incentive effects of litigation fee shifting when legal standards are uncertain," International Review of Law and Economics, Elsevier, vol. 15(2), pages 205-224, June.
    9. Bebchuk, Lucian Arye, 1988. "Suing Solely to Extract a Settlement Offer," The Journal of Legal Studies, University of Chicago Press, vol. 17(2), pages 437-450, June.
    10. Jennifer F. Reinganum & Louise L. Wilde, 1986. "Settlement, Litigation, and the Allocation of Litigation Costs," RAND Journal of Economics, The RAND Corporation, vol. 17(4), pages 557-566, Winter.
    11. Gravelle, H. S. E., 1993. "The efficiency implications of cost-shifting rules," International Review of Law and Economics, Elsevier, vol. 13(1), pages 3-18, March.
    12. Andrea Generale & Giorgio Gobbi, 1996. "Il recupero dei crediti: costi, tempi e comportamenti delle banche," Temi di discussione (Economic working papers) 265, Bank of Italy, Economic Research and International Relations Area.
    13. Cooter, Robert D & Rubinfeld, Daniel L, 1989. "Economic Analysis of Legal Disputes and Their Resolution," Journal of Economic Literature, American Economic Association, vol. 27(3), pages 1067-1097, September.
    14. Katz, Avery, 1990. "The effect of frivolous lawsuits on the settlement of litigation," International Review of Law and Economics, Elsevier, vol. 10(1), pages 3-27, May.
    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. Massimo Finocchiaro Castro & Calogero Guccio, 2014. "Searching for the source of technical inefficiency in Italian judicial districts: an empirical investigation," European Journal of Law and Economics, Springer, vol. 38(3), pages 369-391, December.

    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. Dari-Mattiacci, Giuseppe & Saraceno, Margherita, 2020. "Fee shifting and accuracy in adjudication," International Review of Law and Economics, Elsevier, vol. 63(C).
    2. Michael R. Baye & Dan Kovenock & Casper G. Vries, 2005. "Comparative Analysis of Litigation Systems: An Auction-Theoretic Approach," Economic Journal, Royal Economic Society, vol. 115(505), pages 583-601, July.
    3. Steven Shavell, 2003. "Economic Analysis of Litigation and the Legal Process," NBER Working Papers 9697, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.
    4. Baptiste Massenot & Maria Maraki & Christian Thoeni, 2016. "Legal compliance and litigation spending under the English and American rule: Experimental evidence," Cahiers de Recherches Economiques du Département d'économie 16.19, Université de Lausanne, Faculté des HEC, Département d’économie.
    5. Beckner, Clinton III & Katz, Avery, 1995. "The incentive effects of litigation fee shifting when legal standards are uncertain," International Review of Law and Economics, Elsevier, vol. 15(2), pages 205-224, June.
    6. Schwab, Christian & Tang, Hin-Yue Benny, 2011. "Die Steuerungswirkungen unterschiedlicher Prozesskostenregelungen: Ein Überblick zum Stand von Theorie und Empirie [The economic effects of alternative fee shifting rules: A review of the theoretic," MPRA Paper 32746, University Library of Munich, Germany.
    7. Peter Van Wijck & Ben Van Velthoven, 2000. "An Economic Analysis of the American and the Continental Rule for Allocating Legal Costs," European Journal of Law and Economics, Springer, vol. 9(2), pages 115-125, March.
    8. Cedomir GLIGORIC & Milos PAVLOVIC & Jana CVIJIC RODIC & Sanja DONCIC & Nikola VUJANOVIC, 2023. "Some Aspects of Economic Analysis of Out-of-court Settlement in the Dispute of Negative Expected Value – Case of Republic of Serbia," Business & Management Compass, University of Economics Varna, issue 1, pages 80-95.
    9. Cary Deck & Paul Pecorino & Michael Solomon, 2024. "Litigation with negative expected value suits: An experimental analysis," Journal of Empirical Legal Studies, John Wiley & Sons, vol. 21(2), pages 244-278, June.
    10. Giuseppe Dari-Mattiacci & Bruno Deffains, 2007. "Uncertainty of Law and the Legal Process," Journal of Institutional and Theoretical Economics (JITE), Mohr Siebeck, Tübingen, vol. 163(4), pages 627-656, December.
    11. Kirstein, Roland & Schmidtchen, Dieter, 1997. "Judicial detection skill and contractual compliance," International Review of Law and Economics, Elsevier, vol. 17(4), pages 509-520, December.
    12. Virginia Rosales-López, 2008. "Economics of court performance: an empirical analysis," European Journal of Law and Economics, Springer, vol. 25(3), pages 231-251, June.
    13. Landeo, Claudia M. & Nikitin, Maxim, 2018. "Financially-constrained lawyers: An economic theory of legal disputes," Games and Economic Behavior, Elsevier, vol. 109(C), pages 625-647.
    14. Dari-Mattiacci, Giuseppe & Deffains, Bruno & Lovat, Bruno, 2011. "The dynamics of the legal system," Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization, Elsevier, vol. 79(1), pages 95-107.
    15. Luca Anderlini & Leonardo Felli & Giovanni Immordino, 2019. "Costly Pretrial Agreements," The Journal of Legal Studies, University of Chicago Press, vol. 48(1), pages 159-188.
    16. Farmer, Amy & Pecorino, Paul, 1998. "A reputation for being a nuisance: frivolous lawsuits and fee shifting in a repeated play game," International Review of Law and Economics, Elsevier, vol. 18(2), pages 147-157, June.
    17. Jean Lanjouw & Josh Lerner, 1998. "The Enforcement of Intellectual Property Rights: A Survey of the Empirical Literature," Annals of Economics and Statistics, GENES, issue 49-50, pages 223-246.
    18. Reiko Aoki & Jin-Li Hu, 1996. "Allocation of Legal Costs and Patent Litigation: A Cooperative Game Approach," Industrial Organization 9612001, University Library of Munich, Germany.
    19. Wladislaw Mill & Jonathan Staebler, 2023. "Spite in Litigation," CRC TR 224 Discussion Paper Series crctr224_2023_401, University of Bonn and University of Mannheim, Germany.
    20. Daniel P. Kessler & Daniel L. Rubinfeld, 2004. "Empirical Study of the Civil Justice System," NBER Working Papers 10825, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.

    More about this item

    Keywords

    Efficiency of civil justice; Comparison among EU countries and the Italian case; Supply of justice; Pathological demand of civil justice; Effectiveness of reforms;
    All these keywords.

    JEL classification:

    • K4 - Law and Economics - - Legal Procedure, the Legal System, and Illegal Behavior

    NEP fields

    This paper has been announced in the following NEP Reports:

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    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:isa:wpaper:85. 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: Stefania Rossetti (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/istgvit.html .

    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.