Does Group Familiarity Improve Deliberations in Judicial Teams?

Evidence from the German Federal Court of Justice

authored by

Tilko Swalve

Abstract

Collegiality plays a central role in judicial decision-making. However, we still lack empirical evidence about the effects of collegiality on judicial decision-making. In this article, I argue familiarity, an antecedent to collegiality, improves judicial deliberations by encouraging minority dissent and a more extensive debate of different legal viewpoints. Relying on a novel dataset of 21,613 appeals in criminal cases at the German Federal Court of Justice between 1990 and 2016, I exploit quasi-random assignment of cases to decision-making groups to show that judges' pairwise familiarity substantially increases the probability that judges schedule a main hearing after first-stage deliberations. Group familiarity also increases the length of the justification of the ruling. The findings have implications for the way courts organize the assignment of judges to panels.

Organisation(s)

Institute of Political Science

Type

Article

Journal

Journal of empirical legal studies

Volume

19

Pages

223-249

No. of pages

27

ISSN

1740-1453

Publication date

27.02.2022

Publication status

Published

Peer reviewed

Yes

ASJC Scopus subject areas

Education, Law

Sustainable Development Goals

SDG 16 - Peace, Justice and Strong Institutions

Electronic version(s)

https://doi.org/10.1111/jels.12308 (Access: Open)