Judging in Europe: Do Legal Traditions Matter?

Abstract

EU competition appeals typically involve applications by private businesses to annul decisions made by the European Commission. Moreover, these appeals are first assigned at random to a chamber, with a judge then designated as the rapporteur who will be most closely involved with the case. Using hand-collected original data on the background characteristics of EU judges and on competition judgments by the General Court between 1989 to 2015, we test the extent to which the legal origins of judges bear a statistically significant effect on case outcomes and that the rapporteur plays a crucial role in the decision-making process. In particular, if a rapporteur comes from a country whose administrative law has a strong French influence, the decision is more likely to favor the Commission than if he is from any other EU country. These results are robust to alternative political ideology variables, including left-right politics and a preference for European integration.Angela Huyue Zhang is an associate professor at the University of Hong Kong and a senior lecturer in competition law and trade at King's College London; Jingchen Liu is an associate professor in the Department of Statistics at Columbia University; Nuno Garoupa is a professor at Texas A&M University School of Law who also holds the chair in research innovation at Católica Global Law School, Lisbon. We are grateful for the generous help that we received from a number of current and former members and staff of the Court of Justice of the European Union. We are also indebted to one anonymous referee, Harry First,

Judicial ideology in economic cases: Evidence from the General Court of the European Union

“…Aside from the impact of the median judge, strategic accounts of judicial bargaining on collegial courts point out the influence that the rapporteur judge – that is, the judge entrusted with the task of preparing and writing the decision of the court – may potentially wield as a result of the effort or collegiality costs faced by the median judge (Cameron and Kornhauser, 2013; de Mendonça Lopes, 2019; Hangartner et al., 2015). Zhang et al. (2018) go as far as assuming that the rapporteur judge effectively controls the outcome of General Court decisions.…”

“…While studies conducted in various contexts have found evidence for the impact of ideology (Alarie and Green, 2009; Hanretty, 2012, 2013; Llanos and Lemos, 2013; Voeten, 2007; Weiden, 2011), the few that have undertaken to assess the effect of policy preferences on the rulings of EU judges present serious limitations. Due to the unavailability of the judges’ voting record, scholars have resorted to proxies, such as the party manifesto score of the appointing government (Frankenreiter, 2017; Malecki, 2012) or the legal tradition of the sitting judge (Zhang et al., 2018), whose validity is uncertain.…”

Using machine learning to predict decisions of the European Court of Human Rights

“…For example, Behn and Langford (2017) manually collected and coded roughly 800 cases on Investment Treaty Arbitration. Others have applied quantitative methods in the analysis of case law of the International Criminal Court (Holá et al 2012;Nollez-Goldbach 2014, 2015), the Court of Justice of the European Union (Lindholm and Derlén 2012;Derlén and Lindholm 2014;Tarissan and Nollez-Goldbach 2016;Derlén and Lindholm 2017a, b;Frankenreiter 2017a, b;Zhang et al 2017) or the European Court of Human Rights (Bruinsma and De Blois 1997;Bruinsma 2007;White and Boussiakou 2009;Christensen et al 2016;Olsen and Küçüksu 2017;Madsen 2018).…”

“…A growing body of papers present results of more sophisticated statistical analyses, including regression analysis of case law (see Dhami and Belton 2016). Most of these papers focus on case law from the USA (see Chien 2011;Epstein et al 2013), but researchers outside of the USA have conducted such analyses as well (Holá et al 2012;Behn and Langford 2017;Bricker 2017;van Dijck 2018;Zhang et al 2017;Frankenreiter 2017aFrankenreiter , 2018.…”

Do Legal Origins Predict Legal Substance?

“…1 An extensive body of research in economics and law suggests that the legal model a country follows-known as its "legal origins"has profound long-run effects on a number of economic, political, and social outcomes. These outcomes range from growth in GDP per capita (Mahoney 2001), to use of military conscription (Mulligan and Shleifer 2005a;2005b), to transmission rates of HIV (Anderson 2018), to climate change policies (Fredriksson and Wollscheid 2015), to criminal incarceration (D'Amico and Williamson 2015), and to judicial decisions (Zhang, Liu, and Garoupa 2018).…”