Judicial enforcement and caseload: theory and evidence from Brazil

How has the Covid19 pandemic impacted the courts of law? Evidence from Brazil

“…First, enforcement proceedings do not require the conduct of hearings, rendering enforcement comparatively less vulnerable to the pandemic-caused disruption. Second, labor-court judges are able to implement many enforcement-related tasks, such as the confiscation of funds from the checking account of a non-compliant losing party or the blocking of the transfer of their property title, using remotely-accessible software (see Castelliano et al, 2020b ). Third, it is likely that, following the onset of the pandemic, the judicial and staff effort that would have normally been devoted to the conduct of trial hearings and other adjudication activities was purposefully re-directed toward enforcement activities.…”

“…A related subset of research has investigated court-level factors affecting the use of different modes of court case disposition (e.g., Galanter, 2004 ; Dimitrova-Grajzl et al, 2014 ). In contrast, judicial enforcement of final verdicts, a distinct and often especially vital facet of court activity, has received much less attention ( EBRD, 2014 ; Castelliano et al, 2020b ). Our paper advances the corresponding literature by empirically examining the impact of the Covid19 pandemic on all three of the above-noted aspects of court output and operations.…”

“…In the event of such non-compliance, the winning party must initiate separate judicial enforcement proceedings at the first-instance labor court office that adjudicated the original dispute. 4 To enforce court-mandated payments, labor-court judges resort to a variety of patrimonial constrictions, the implementation of all of which requires judicial attention and time (see Castelliano et al, 2020b ).…”

“… 3 The information presented in this section draws heavily on parts of Section 2 in Castelliano et al (2020b) . …”

Multidomain judging and administration of justice: evidence from a major emerging-market jurisdiction

“…The reason is that, because of multidomain judging, efficacy in disposition of cases in any given domain may be shaped by caseload pressures in other domains (see e.g. Castelliano et al, 2021). When our measure of efficacy is either the volume of resolved cases or disposition time, we include the number of all newly filed cases and the number of all cases pending at the beginning of the year.…”