One judge to rule them all: Single‐member courts as an answer to delays in criminal trials

Abstract

This paper is a discussion of whether single-member judicial panels are an effective way of accelerating the delivery of criminal justice. We use a reform which introduced singlemember courts in Greece, where delays in court proceedings are common according to the European Justice Scoreboard and the European Court of Human Rights. We use a novel dataset of 1463 drug trafficking cases tried between June 2012 and January 2014. As our measure of efficiency we use the time to issue a decision, and we find that singlemember panels are as efficient as three-member ones. We take advantage of a feature of the reform to control for several confounding factors and support a causal interpretation of our findings. We complement our analysis with a survey of 142 judges to guide our interpretation of the results.

Empirical Foundation of Normative Arguments in Legal Reasoning

“…Beyond Germany, Kalliris and Alysandratos (2023), studying an urgent topic in Greece, find that single-member panels are as efficient as three-member ones. Suppose that policymakers in Greece, given the serious judicial delay in Greece, were concerned about judicial inefficiency if criminal cases would be handled by a single judge.…”