The Duration of Judicial Deliberation: Evidence from Belgium

We utilize case-level data from a large Belgian court to study a policy-relevant but thus far empirically unexplored aspect of judicial behavior: the time that a judge takes to deliberate on a case before rendering a verdict. Exploiting the de facto random administrative assignment of filed cases among the serving judges and using survival-analysis methods, we find that the duration of judicial deliberation varies not only with measures of case complexity, but also with judge and disputing-party characteristics. We further find evidence consistent with the hypothesis that longer judicial deliberation improves the quality of judicial decisions.